XP – When cdrom’s disappear

Don’t you just hate it, you go round to somebodies house,and they mention that they could do with a little help with a problem on their computer and then a while later you’re still sitting there scratching your head LoLWell today was one of those days, but thankfully an answer was forthcoming very quickly 🙂

A friends HP desktop machine had mysteriously lost it’s cdrom and cd burner, they were there, listed in device manager, but marked as having problems – so I did the first thing we all try, uninstall them, reboot and let XP do it’s magic and bring them back again – but this time no joy… so I did a bit of searching…

It’s been a while since someone had brought me this problem, mainly it happened when people got SP2, but still, these things always raise their ugly heads when you least expect, but today I was on top googling form and found the solution I was looking for to make the little beggers come back from the dead.

The solution is actually very simple, as follows:

1. Start Registry Editor (Start, Run and type in regedit then click)
2. Find “UpperFilters” and “LowerFilters” (and “UpperFilters.bak” “LowerFilters.bak“, if they exist) value under the following key in the registry, and delete it: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}
3. Quit Registry Editor.
4. Reboot.

You might have to re-install your CD burning software after the reboot, but this should bring your CD drives back to life, if it doesn’t, well don’t come running to me, I can’t claim to know everything out there, but a good google session normally can find you the solution to anything 😉

-Roamer