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Optical drives vanished. (resolved)
Rankenphile
Passersby were amazedby the unusually large amounts of blood.Registered User, Moderator Mod Emeritus
Passersby were amazedby the unusually large amounts of blood.Registered User, Moderator Mod Emeritus
Been scratching my head over this for too long, don't want to have to format if I can avoid it.
Basically, my optical drives just... stopped showing up.
I'm running Vista 64 Home Premium, have an NEC DVD-RW and a Plextor CD-R, both of which I can see just fine in my device manager. Real easy to spot, too, they got a nice handy little exclamation mark over them.
Disk Manager doesn't show them whatsoever.
Try to disable, reboot and enable the drives? Nothing happens. Try to uninstall and reboot, scan for new hardware? They can't install. Manufacturers don't provide drivers for them, because apparently the OS should provide all that. And I've used them a bunch in the past, they just... stopped showing up.
I don't know when it happened, but I first noticed it maybe a week or two ago. Now I'm getting frustrated because everything I've tried hasn't worked.
So, any ideas?
Basically, my optical drives just... stopped showing up.
I'm running Vista 64 Home Premium, have an NEC DVD-RW and a Plextor CD-R, both of which I can see just fine in my device manager. Real easy to spot, too, they got a nice handy little exclamation mark over them.
Disk Manager doesn't show them whatsoever.
Try to disable, reboot and enable the drives? Nothing happens. Try to uninstall and reboot, scan for new hardware? They can't install. Manufacturers don't provide drivers for them, because apparently the OS should provide all that. And I've used them a bunch in the past, they just... stopped showing up.
I don't know when it happened, but I first noticed it maybe a week or two ago. Now I'm getting frustrated because everything I've tried hasn't worked.
So, any ideas?
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I used a Microsoft fix for the problem. It's been awhile but it was for roxio CD/DVD burning software fucking up the registry and it fixed the problem for me. Sorry I can't be more help.
what sort of "Microsoft fix" would you recommend? I'm almost ready to just reformat, but if I can't fucking use the optical drive, I can't very well reinstall, can I?
Find cdrom.sys. Rename it to cdromx.sys so that Windows can't find it. Reboot.
Windows should recreate the file. Reboot again.
Your CD drive now works.
@gamefacts - Totally and utterly true gaming facts on the regular!
so I'm in as administrator, how the fuck do I get it to allow me to change permissions on the windows drive so I can fucking make changes to files within it?
Right-click the folder or file again, go back to the Security tab of Properties and click on Edit. If the name of the account you're using isn't listed, click on Add and type it in. If it is or you've typed it in, give that account full control by checking that box. Click OK, close Properties and that should be it.
Now what's convoluted about that?
I did.
And it won't let me make those permission changes to the windows folder. Said "Access is Denied".
What the fuck
I've had this problem quite a bit, actually. It's generally because crap in there's being used by the system (must say I never really had that problem with XP).
Have you got a Vista disc with you? If you pop it in and reboot, you should be able to boot into the disc and go into some recovery options. There'll be an option to open up a Command Prompt and you can do what you need to from there. You can't open Explorer from there, so you may want to install a secondary file manager, like the one included with 7-Zip.
unfortunately, I packed all my discs and brought them to the new apartment this past weekend, and am in the process of moving. I'll give this a shot once we get moved down this coming week.
(Also, I was reminded elsewhere that Vista comes on a DVD, not a CD. Sorry 'bout that.)
I would back up those registry keys before you try this just in case it doesn't fix it.
now, before a lock gets thrown on this, let me point something out - when I rebooted, the drives were visible and functional, but iTunes had an error message that the registry entries that it used for burning discs were gone, and that I needed to reinstall. I'm going to do so now and report back - if it doesn't fuck shit up, we're gold, if not, fuck, we need a workaround.
Oh sweet frylock, I could kiss you
Pass. Sigh. Why can't it ever be the chicks that have missing optical drives?
Anyway, this has happened to me on a number of occasions. It's apparently something dumb in the design of XP/Vista. As near as I can tell, various programs that interact with your CD-ROM drive on a low level (burners, etc.) need to install special little mini-drivers for it. These are the UpperFilters and LowerFilters. I'm not sure what makes them "upper" and "lower," probably one runs before some process and one runs after it. Anyway, these are little bits of executable code. For whatever reason, uninstalling or upgrading certain of these programs has a tendency to fuck these things up. Either the drivers themselves are deleted, or some software they depend on is deleted, who knows? Windows' natural reaction is, of course, to make your drives mysteriously disappear.
Completely nuking the UpperFilters and LowerFilters isn't always a great idea either. I guess iTunes will notice and recreate the entries in there that iTunes needs, but other programs might not. The real solution in this case is to go back and add in the filters one at a time until you figure out which ones work and which ones are busted, so you still have the set of filters in there that are needed for your programs that still work.