Hello all! I am not seeing my optical drives in Windows Explorer unless there is a disc in them. Yes, I have "Hide Empty Drives" unchecked. Thanks!
I can only see empty optical drives on my computers under "devices and drives" in the right side of file explorer when I select "This PC" on the left side. If that works for you, select open file explorer to this pc instead of quick access. Other than that, I don't know.
You may try as these icons are not shortcuts, right click on desktop, select personalize. then when Settings pops up, select Themes/ then desktop icon settings, then select which icons you want on your desktop, I would select all of them, these are real, the one's on your desktop, right click on each, select properties, if it says Shortcut, delete those. Make sure you get My PC if not all.
It's not the biggest thing, but it's a bloody annoyance when you're used to one thing and someone makes a *stupid* change like that ........ <grumble>
Have you checked under Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Disk Management to see if the optical drives have a letter allocated? If they haven't, under Win 10 this can be done with an empty drive.