New Drive labeled "Diag" appeared out of nowhere

[davidrosen]

So I haven't gotten a chance to do any troubleshooting myself yet, but my girlfriend just told me that she has a new harddrive listed called "Diag" as her J drive, totally out of nowhere. All that is in it is an empty folder called "PRELOAD."

Any idea what that's all about?

Thanks

 

[ronintexas]

I haven't experienced this - I would start with a malware scan and virus scan before looking at other items....

 

[MarkW]

She might have some weird virus or malware. I did a search on google for the J drive DIAG and a folder named PRELOAD and came up empty. So I don't know.

 

[davidrosen]

yea my searches have come up completely empty as well. i've got malwarebytes doing a full scan right now of all of her drives... probably take a million hours because she's a photographer and has multiple terabytes of storage haha... then i'll continue from there...

 

[reedo_43]

Does she have a lenovo? They typically call there restore partitions by that name.

 

[davidrosen]

No its a Dell XPS 8700 desktop.

Malware bytes still running...

 

[mbarnes86]

Hi

Look in Disk Management to confirm location and size of mysterious drive
To confirm it is a real partition or some sort of driver or virtual drive

Depending on hard drive size I would expect a number of small partitions
For diagnostics , recovery and gpt partitions as well as the main partitions

Possibly the system crashed, did a automated system recovery then a hidden diagnostic partition became visible


I have the opposite occur a visible d: drive letter containing system recovery files vanished after runnining the program to build a set of recovery disks dvd's

The Dell user guide may have details on what partitions should exist on the hard drive

Finally are there drive letters c d e f g h I & j or is there a gap between last drive letter and j: ?


Regards
Mike Barnes

 

[davidrosen]

OK so malwarebytes found nothing on the full scan.

Before I reboot, checking disc management shows my disc 0 being my D: (a big internal ). Disc 1 is 6 partitions but only one with a drive letter c: (it's my os drive and the other partitions all sound like recovery and system related). Then E: is my dvd drive. F:, g:, and i: are all externals. H: is an SD card reader. And that's it. J: doesn't appear.

Also some more details. J: is called DIAGS, has 35.9mb free of 36mb. And all that is in it is an empty folder called PRELOAD.

Gonna run a virus scan now and then reboot and see what happens.

Oh and one more thing. In case I wasn't clear before, this is new. I was out of town for a few days but I do all the support on her computer and last week on back to when she got the computer there was not a 36mb extra drive called DIAGS. So it's not like it's just how Dell partitions their recovery software or anything like that...

Thanks

 

[MarkW]

Is there a Restore Point available from last week?

 

[davidrosen]

So after both Virus Scan and malwarebytes found nothing, I rebooted... And it's gone. So I guess it was just some weird oddity, I don't know... If it ever comes back, you guys will be the first to know Haha

 

[MarkW]

It was magic. Like this...

 

[don h j]

So after both Virus Scan and malwarebytes found nothing, I rebooted... And it's gone. So I guess it was just some weird oddity, I don't know... If it ever comes back, you guys will be the first to know Haha

I have had this same drive appear on my DEL XPS 8700, appeared first a few weeks ago after searching and finally rebooting disappeared. Since have upgraded from W8.1 to W10 and today DIAGS re-appeared. Have you found a resolution?

 

[woodennickel]

I too have the Del xps 8700 and I too suddenly have this new drive that mysteriously appeared. It actually pushed its way in, renamed my other drives -- J, K, L etc.... so I am having to remap items.... wish I new what it was... (same size 36mb)

 

[woodennickel]

Here is the answer:

http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/disk-drives/f/3534/p/19989498/20934710?rfsh=1471919076264