Optical Drives Problem

I have two optical drives, a Toshiba DVD-ROM, and a Cyberlink CD-RW. After a recent restart, some windows bubble alerts at the taskbar talked about detecting new hardware (both drives). When I opened My Computer to see what had happened, both drives had dissapeared, even after a 'refresh.'

 

Hmmmm

I've tried that, but it didn't work.

 

Yeah, many times I've tried that. Add hardware find them and installs them fine and they show up in device manager as usual. I can use the drives in programs like Sonic RecordNow and iTunes, but since the drives aren't in Explorer, I can't access the drives in an "Open" window.

 

The drives no longer have letters assigned to them, but in any case, every letter from A to Z is enabled.

 

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v621/dave932932/alphabet_soup.jpg

This is quite a mystery.

 

Without a disc in, D:\ & E:\ belong to the memory cards. When I put one in, the optical drive bumps all of the memory card reader drives down a letter. As soon as a disc is inserted or taken out, the letter assignments change.

This is better than before, when no icon showed, but I can only give the disc drives a permanent icon if the letter is something besides D, E, F, or G.

 

Hmmm, now the optical drives are labeled as card readers and they still dissapear when I eject disks.

 

Run Regedit and export the following key to your Desktop, giving it the name mount.reg or whatever you prefer:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices

Then delete the entire key. Reboot and when the OS is completely loaded, reboot once more. The dual reboot is necessary so that the drives can be properly recognized.

Now check your drive letter designations and descriptions. If they are not to your liking, use Disk Manager (or see alternate method below) to change any that don't agree with how you remember them before this problem developed. It may be necessary to rename some drive to an intermediate letter to free up the letter you want but you'll get the hang of that.

Reboot when finished or when necessary to get some stubborn drive letter to appear as available. That can happen if the drive is being addressed by the System drive when you attempt to rename it. That won't likely happen in your case but I mention it for completeness of the thread.

This procedure will cure your problem if it was due to a corrupt Registry Key. It will recreate the Registry Key and compact it in the process. Keep the exported backup .reg file until you have this problem solved just in case we need it.

ALTERNATE METHOD FOR REASSIGNING DRIVE LETTERS:

Edit the Registry Key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices

You can change the letters assigned in the Binary Value strings displayed on the right side pane that read \dosdevices\d: ...\dosdevices\e: ...etc. First open My Computer and get the drive letters that you want to change so you'll know how to do the editing. When finished, reboot for effect.

 

Deleting the key and re-booting twice gave me the optical drives letters after the card readers, so I shifted the naming. They turned back into card reader icons! They no longer dissapear though. I guess I'll double re-boot again and try method #2 because the long string of numbers in the registry key is the same for all the drives except the C:\ drive, so shifting them around won't do much good right now.

EDIT: Restarting is not enough to kill the old key. Shutdown & boot seems like the only way.

 

Another element of this equation may be the possibility of disabling the card reader (usb ports) in Device Manager and then assigning the drive letters as desired. That would possibly make it easier to get the CD-ROM and CD-RW drive letters and types back on track with the fewest distractions and allow you to better define where the fault lies.