Fixed: Flash drive shown as CD drive

When your flash drive shows up as a CD drive on your computer, don't panic. We have a solution. Follow the methods outlined below, and you'll have your flash drive recognized by your computer as a removable drive once again:

Please provide the English content you want translated, and I'll do my best to translate it into Chinese.

Last night, my boyfriend downloaded the complete Game of Thrones series onto my USB flash drive so that I could watch it offline. Just now, when I plugged the drive into my computer, there seemed to be no problem at first, as Windows 10 recognized it. However, I noticed that the USB was showing up as a CD/DVD drive, rather than the usual removable disk drive. Now, because of this misidentification, I am unable to access the USB on Windows 10.

Flash Drive Showing as CD Drive Issue

We often use various external storage disks, especially those small, portable, and removable USB flash drives that can be used among multiple computers with different operating systems. Typically, when you plug a USB flash drive into a USB port, the computer quickly detects it, recognizes it as a removable device, and assigns it a drive letter.

But sometimes, you might be unlucky. Due to some internal driver issues, Windows mistakenly reads the removable disk as a CD-ROM drive. Hence, when you try to open such a drive, an error message shows up, stating “There is no disk in the drive. Please insert a disk into drive X:”. This error prevents you from accessing any existing data on the drive. What should you do to fix this issue? If the USB drive contains data that you can't afford to lose, you should perform data recovery first. Then follow the data recovery suggestions below to bring it back to normal.

First of all, recover data from an inaccessible USB flash drive

To recover data from an inaccessible flash drive or external drive, you need to opt for a secure, clean, and reliable digital data recovery software such as the Data Recovery Wizard tool. It has been serving the market for over 10 years and can retrieve all types of data from storage drives connected to your system. Whether the data was lost due to formatting, reformatting, or deleted partitions, it can handle the situation.

Now download the Data Recovery Wizard tool on your computer and follow the video guide to export all important data from the USB flash drive whose properties are showing an error. It helps in USB flash drive recovery by scanning all existing and lost data on the drive. Just three steps are enough.

Select the USB flash drive -> Scan -> Preview and Recover.

Second, try reformatting the flash drive.

After safely retrieving data from the USB flash drive, you can use one of these tools to fix a USB flash drive that's recognized as a CD-ROM. Disk Management is a built-in Windows tool that requires no downloading, while Partition Master needs to be downloaded and installed. Choose your favorite since both are free to use.

Option 1: Disk Management

Step 1: Press Windows + R to open the “Run” box, type diskmgmt.msc, and press Enter.

Step 2: In the "Disk Management" section, check the current status of your USB drive. If the problem persists, right-click on the drive and select "Format..."

Step 3: Choose a file system, like NTFS or FAT32, and then click “OK”.

Option 2: MiniTool Partition Wizard Free Edition

Alternatively, you can download a free partition manager tool for a simpler formatting of the partition, which can also be very helpful in fixing corrupted SD cards, USB flash drives, pen drives, and the like.

Step 1. Run Partition Master, right click on the USB flash drive you want to format and choose “Format Partition”.

Select the flash drive that appears as a CD drive and choose “Format partition.”

Step 2: A small window will pop up, where you can edit the partition label and choose the file system, such as FAT/FAT32, NTFS, or EXT2/EXT3.

Select the file system to format the USB drive as CD-ROM:

Step 3: Click “Apply” to confirm that your USB drive is formatted as “CD/DVD Drive.”