Mystery of the missing DVD driveFollow

Many moons ago, the DVD drives on both my laptop and desktops vanished from view in windows explorer. I did some googling, and didn't really find an acceptable answer. For my laptop, I simply had to go back in time through the use of system restore, and find a point in time before the drive vanished.

That did the trick for my laptop, I've tried the same thing with my desktop but it hasn't worked. I've done some more googling, and followed the advice given to two or three people, but my DVD drive continues to not exist.

Any suggestions? I'm baffled.

I don't seem to have a key for "LowerFilters"

I deleted the data value in UpperFilters, and rebooted, no good. Then I replaced the data that was there just in case it messed with anything else.


I know more about computers than the average computer user, but this is mostly gibberish to me, sorry.

Just restarted it, it shows up when the computer is starting up, so the BIOS does pick it up. The drive is less than a year old, my dad put it in for xmass last December.

It's got to be a software error, possibly generated by a windows update of some kind because both the DVD drives on my desktop and my laptop vanished at nearly the same time.

EDIT: Too bad I don't remember when it happened... that would probably help.

Edited, Aug 20th 2007 9:31:41am by NixNot

Couple things.

Is the drive seen in the BIOS? (You already answered this so ignore) For the drive, have you tried reseating the cables and using a different power cable for it? The power cables are cheap little critters and do this from time to time. For the BIOS, is it set to PnP OS and are both of the IDE enabled? For the CD-ROM, is that set to auto-detect or is it set to CD-ROM? You may want to enable the CD-ROM option as opposed to auto there.

When the drive isn't seen, do you just restart or do you power down then power back up? I had a similar issue with a DVD burner that worked fine one night, the next day nothing. I shut the power down, reseated the cable, set the secondary IDE to CD-ROM from auto for both of them and powered back up, end of issue.



Edited, Aug 20th 2007 9:38:02am by Wordaen

Updates:

The drive has the Wide flat cable.
I unplugged and replugged all cables, on every connection, no good, still no drive.

have you tried updating the chipset (motherboard drivers) for your computer?

it is probably a VIA or something along that line. when the system boots it should tell you. also if it is a custom built computer you should have the original CD that came with the MB. you can always go BACK to the older chipset drivers and see if that does not help.

/hold it, wait i have no CDrom, how can i read that data....

you indicated that your laptop now works, so you could copy the raw data to your laptop, then via a network transfer the data to your desktop, or use a USB external pen drive, loads of options here.

1. BIOS sees the drive
2. you have unplugged and replugged the drive cables (reseating them)
3. to my knowledge there are NO sATA CD/DVD drives they are all still either IDE or SCSI.
4. this is a known issue with all microsoft OSs since win95b. in most cases a MB driver update will fix the problem.
5. if it does not, then you have other, bigger problems that are normally, in windows that is, only fixed by a format reinstall of the OS from scratch.

so next step depending on the brand of your computer is to find the proper chipset and update the MB primarily for the IDE connections.

Wint, I think you're on to something. I followed the directions in your link. I have two primaries and two secondaries, I hope because of my hardware, it's supposed to be like that.

Both of the Primary IDE channels are fine, according to those directions. One of the Secondary IDEs is also fine, but the second one reads "Transfer mode: PIO Only" and "Current Transfer Mode: PIO Mode."

I followed the instructions in Wint's link and rebooted. No dice. Then I tried uninstalling both Secondary IDEs (following the link instructions) No dice x2. Then uninstalled all four IDE entries, both primaries and both secondaries. Nothing.

But, on the plus side (?) every time I'd fiddled with the secondary IDE that was set in PIO mode, then restarted, windows would alert me that it found a disk drive before going through and reinstalling the secondary IDE.

Any Ideas?

In the device manager list? I've read through the whole thing and there is no CD/DVD section at all. I only have one CD/DVD drive, I think I only have one Hard Disk as well, which is why I thought that having two Primary and Secondary IDEs was kind of odd.

You can always try this as well. I have a feeling something is screwed with either your cable, drive itself, or your registry.

Download CDgone to your desktop.

Right click and choose Extract All,
open folder and double click on cdgone.reg file

Do Not Click on EditReg.reg file

Restart your PC

If your BIOS is seeing that drive on the IDE chain then I would suspect there is nothing wrong on the hardware side.

The EditReg.reg basically clears out and adds the lower class entry that you said is missing and also adds a few other device related keys. I know taking someone's word for it not being harmful is hard but I scanned the file and it's clean.





Edited, Aug 20th 2007 11:09:39pm by xXBijiontXx

Correct by removing those Upper and Lower entries your Drive should have been forced to be re-added. Very strange that it didn't. . . You may have a semi one off issue but there was a similar documentation with windows with hints towards what you have.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314060/EN-US/

I am still looking around however if BIOS sees it at the POST, then hardware is generally good. Something you can do to test that theory is to put in a bootable CD or DVD like a Windows XP cd and try booting from it. If it will not boot off a bootable CD/DVD then it probably a hardware issue as when you boot in that fashion it should use just generic drivers.

You can also try booting into safe mode and seeing if the drive shows up their as it will load those drivers again as part of it's safe default.

Do you happen to have another drive and cable you could try? Some times for me the fastest way to narrow down the problem is to try other devices. I know the drive is new-ish, but that doesn't mean it can't fail 6 months out

Other than that I'm out of ideas short of reinstalling Windows to see if that fixes it, and that should probably be the very last thing you try.

This might be a silly question (especially if you've already sent your computer back to your father) but did you try reinstalling the drivers for the DVD drive?

I assume you've done that, in which case try going into your device manager and deleting the drive entirely, then rebooting and installing the drive again.

But I'd start by installing the drivers, you can google them fairly easily with the manufacturer's name and 'dvd drive'.