Greetings once again gurus, I've gotten a UseNet account at both NewsDemon and Eweka.nl, using Forte Agent 6 to snatch binaries...... no, not THAT kinda "snatch".... the verb, not the noun Trivia: "imbecile" is both a noun and adjective, invented by Sigmund Freud as part of his 3-tiered intelligence model that also includes "moron" and "idiot". The latter is the lowest, btw. Anyway, the following issue has me convinced I have some portion of each goin' on.

My gear is an MSI GL75 Leopard laptop and love it. Running Win10 x64. When I click "This PC" to see all drives, a "CD Drive (E" icon has been living rent-free in my system. if I click it, it snarls "Please insert a disc into CD Drive (E". I have NO optical storage, only an external SSD I connect with USB 3 - to - SATA adapter. I need to nuke the "CD Drive" so I can assign "E" to a physical drive. I forgot that UseNet newsgroups can bloat and blow out a storage device quickly...."GULP!!!!"''''... like me with a vanilla Haagen Dasz/Ovaltine chocolate malt shake.

All I get is "can't", "won't" and "don't" while trying to commit this hate crime against this measly POS icon. BTW, I tried out a few apps like PowerISO, ISOBuster, etc. I uninstalled them just in case. Reaching for coherency here: I THINK that "CD Drive (E" thing is installed by Windows 10; if I can discover "who" it belongs to it might, in a perfect world, reveal a lot.

Thanks for any ideas and especially tolerating my verbose posts. My participation here has been thin and I very much appreciate finding at logon I've held a place among you cool cats A shot in the dark here..... is this the realm of "Thumper DC"? I recall his generosity and actual interaction with members.

I got a million stories and this one is relevant in terms of "sysops" and the rare ones who socialize. 1988 I was running a Commodore 64 with 300 baud modem, learning as I could about telecommunications. Yes, 300 baud Anybody here old enough to remember the "BBS" realm? Like the fetus of the Internet only as peer-to-peer as it gets: direct link with users via telephone line. In the late 80's here jiust south of Baltimore, Maryland a chic with the identity "Dreama" ran a BBS. I had a couple occasions to consult her about programming a modem. Her knowledge was very impressive..... I'd figured she was young but extraordinarily intelligent.

Fast forward (don't nod off yet!!!!) to 1996. I worked for the agency that maintains the database of ALL frequencies and bands of the electromagnetic spectrum with an emphasis on military needs and uses. A new employee was in the smokin' lounge...... gorgeous chic with "cerebral" written all over...... the parts I could see, anyway We introduced ourselves, and in conversation I mentioned BBS's. She told me she ran a quite popular BBS...... yes, it was "Dreama" herself, live and in technicolor. No way. Yep, WAY. She knew the whole telecomms language, AT commands, etc......... when she was TWELVE years old!!!! I was laughing so hard at the moment and coincidence. A good friend married her..... she's a PhD with Oracle or similar corporate giant.

Thanks for reading, amigos...... y'all be well and TIA on how to nuke that icon/virtual CD (if it's even that),

Oh yeah. My big break into the scene was the when I got my 1200 baud modem. The big deal back then was setting up a war games dialer probing for long distance services, go to school, and come home to a printout of access accounts so you could hack into those remote systems. My favorite was the DEC PDP series. I was lucky I didn't get busted back then.
That C64 taught me reverse engineering and machine and binary language on the Motorola 6502 CPU.
Those were the days.

Now to the current days. Sounds like you did or at one point you loaded a program that creates a virtual CD, and ISO program or possibly a video viewing program. Somewhere in your registry is that value that makes it happen. What it may be? I'll leave that to another member.
Moving on, after over decades on the Usenet, qBittorrent is my favorite with Newshosting as my provider. Where did I get my name? I was admin of the board alt.bin.dvdr for years I took a job 20 years back with the understanding I give that up, so I had to. Good times back then, compressing and authoring unlocked DVDs to fit on a 4.7GB single layer DVDR, that's all the DVDRs they made at the time.. The Usenet was how we would distribute them, each proud of the settings they figured out on the Pegasus video encoder, far superior to the commercial frame dropping one click wonder programs of the day. Different days back then.

I had a virtual CD drive icon also. Often you can right mouse on icon and find "Unmount".
But I also use Macrium to make backup images; and PowerISO. I had used one of them to search within an image, and forgot to use their unmount command. Once done it went away.

OK ready?
Power ISO - delete it with Revo
Go to device manager - uninstall CD manually if preseny
Finally;
Open Registry Editor. Press Windows key + R to open the Run dialog box. Type regedit and press Enter.
Navigate to the following key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\DriveIcons
In the right pane, look for the value that corresponds to the drive that you want to remove. The value name will be the drive letter, such as C: or D:.
Right-click on the value and select Delete.

If nothing else works, do what every pirate is forced to do,
Erase entire disk, I use EaseUS partition master, force of habit, good program.
Install Win10 or whatever you want. Watch out what you install in the future, not all cracks are perfect.
Been there, done that. Any long-term member says otherwise is fibbing.

Doggie Daddy-- while your tips about registry are helpful, I don't see what problem you have with PowerISO. From way back I have used it to view contents of an .iso. True, Windows now has that ability to mount an .iso.
But to make an a new iso or add files to one Windows has mounted, Chat tells me Windows cannot do that and one still needs a prog like PowerISO or ImgBurn.

PowerISO is fine. I have used it since the 'XP days. The OP has a persistent virtual CD he wants to rid his system of, he wants that drive letter that it's assigned. That's the problem the OP is dealing with, it has been known for that problem infrequently. PowerISO does a good job, the fact that Win allows you to mount ISO's lessens it's importunacy. Great way to snoop out nasties in ISO programs as well.

I understood the OP's problem. I brought up Macrium and PowerISO in case he had a similar program and had forgotten that he'd mounted an iso with them.
...perhaps the overly verbose Salsantana will update us on his progress..
btw...did your spell checker interfere and convert "importancy" to "importunacy?"