Windows Vista Missing CD-rom drive in Vista

Hi,

I have a very curious problem, one which has afflicted quite a few pc's from the hits I've found in Google.

I have recently installed Vista Business from scratch on an AS-Rock M/B with 4GB DDR2 ram, Core2Duo e4500 @2.2GHz. I have a 52x cd-rom drive and an 8x DVD-RW. The curiosity is in the fact that although I can see the cd in bios and can even select it to boot from if I press F11 in bios when it comes to Vista I cannot see the cd-rom drive.

Some suggestions involved editing a certain key in the registry and removing Upperfilters and LowerFilters but I did not have them in the specified key (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929461).
Someone suggested a very silly workaround by putting the pc to sleep and after a couple of minutes when you bring it out of sleep mode the cd-rom drive is there.

While it's missing I cannot add it from add new hardware as there is no entry for optical drives. I know it is quite a silly thing but I do have to keep putting the machine to sleep if I want to use the cd.

Is there someone with any more suggestions? My pc is now updated with all possible updates and even sp1.

Thanks.

 

Thanks for the tip, will give it a try

 

Hi Steve,

Thanks again for the tip.

Well, after removing both optical drives, re-booting, shut down and boot up again with both connected I got the driver software installation and on clicking to view more info the cd-rom drive said "searching pre-donfigured driver folder" and remained that way. The DVD-RW drive installed and "ready to use" was written near it on the same message.

So that got me nowhere. Then after looking at more info on google I came upon a post from way back in 2006 when someone using vista rc2 complained with the same problem with the same model of cd-rom drive! Another poster asked if maybe the drives where sata.

Well, that got me thinking as I had connected both optical drives to an ide to sata converter, since I have 4 ide devices and only one ide port on my new m/board. So I connected my optical drives to the ide port and my hdd to the converters and hey presto it worked. Now I can see all my optical drives and also both hard drives.

So maybe it's some sort of os-hardware compatibility issue or maybe because the cd drive is only ata2 so it's a little dated but connecting it to the one of the ide channels solved the issue.

Thanks again for your tip which ultimately got me into thinking more, although it did not solve my issue firsthand.

And I call myself a technician! Eh, Mr.Slob!

 

To save my face a little, I would like to add that google can make people lazy. Much like the speed dial on a mobile phone can make you forget people's numbers.
I realised that I am relying more and more on google searches to solve problems instead of delving first hand. Still the fault is all mine I suppose.....

 

Probably. Let me do a search......