Where did my CD and DVD drives go??

Hello and thanks for looking in.

I just got a call from my wife at home who told my our CD ROM drive is "not working." After a couple of minutes of talking to her and having her check a few things, it appears that my D: drive (CD burner) and E: drive (DVD reader) no longer show up when looking at the drives under "My Computer." There is nothing there - just the floppy drive and the hard-drive.

This is an 8 month-old Dell desktop running WinXP. I haven't installed anything or otherwise played around in adding or deleting hardware.

Anyone have any ideas what happened to my drives, or (more importantly) what the easiest way to get them back is?

I'm unsure what brand of CD/DVD drives are in the machine. My guess is that this is not really a hardware issue as much as an OS question, but I thought I'd post the question here.

Thanks,
Ken

 

What is the OS?

 

Mark(p62)

My first reaction would be to reseat the cable connections.

Has the machine been rebooted? The BIOS or Windows may have been a bit slow out of bed on that boot and missed them.

Matt

 

Myself and another poster recently went through similar experiences. Both of our problems were trace back to loose connections or damaged wires / cables. See this one and here. Good luck, keep us posted

 

I've found that the answer is this:

Start/Run/Regedt32

Go to

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro
l\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}

In the right hand pane, you should see these two keys:

UpperFilters
LowerFilters

If you have any data in these keys, right click on each key and click "modify" and delete any data in each key.

Close regedt32 and reboot and your drives should be back.

As with any registry editing, be careful. You might want to right click on the key and export it to a file before doing any of this. I don't back up first, but I have a high tolerance for pain.

Good luck.