Unsolvable XP Home CD-Rom Problem

  • Thread starter Thread starter jambarama
  • Start date Start date
J

jambarama

I've had the strangest problem recently. I re-installed XP Home, all
went smoothly. I added each new app that I needed one at a time,
testing them to make sure they worked. Again, all went smoothly. Most
of this I installed from CD. The last thing to go on my computer was
going to be Nero. I had just done a bunch of online downloads and
installs (iTunes, Cygwin, JDK, Eclipse, & OpenOffice) and disabled some
of the services I always disabled (indexing, error reporting and a few
others) so it was time to put in the Nero disc.

I had disabled autorun for VMWare player, so I didn't expect the
installer to pop up, but opened "My Computer". There were no CD drives
there. I checked the "Device Manager" it recognizes both of my DVD
Drives and has the appropriate driver but a yellow ! by each one. I
grabbed the drivers off the net and reinstalled them. No difference.
I tried updating the drivers, removing the devices and adding them
again, all to no avail. One is an external Lite-On DVD burner (USB &
Firewire, I tried them both) and the other is an internal QSI
DVD-Rom/CD-RW.

I am really stumped. I'd rather not re-install Windows again just for
this, so if the good people here have any ideas, I'd love to hear them.
Thanks

Sean
 
I've had the strangest problem recently. I re-installed XP Home, all
went smoothly. I added each new app that I needed one at a time,
testing them to make sure they worked. Again, all went smoothly. Most
of this I installed from CD. The last thing to go on my computer was
going to be Nero. I had just done a bunch of online downloads and
installs (iTunes, Cygwin, JDK, Eclipse, & OpenOffice) and disabled some
of the services I always disabled (indexing, error reporting and a few
others) so it was time to put in the Nero disc.

I had disabled autorun for VMWare player, so I didn't expect the
installer to pop up, but opened "My Computer". There were no CD drives
there. I checked the "Device Manager" it recognizes both of my DVD
Drives and has the appropriate driver but a yellow ! by each one. I
grabbed the drivers off the net and reinstalled them. No difference.
I tried updating the drivers, removing the devices and adding them
again, all to no avail. One is an external Lite-On DVD burner (USB &
Firewire, I tried them both) and the other is an internal QSI
DVD-Rom/CD-RW.

I am really stumped. I'd rather not re-install Windows again just for
this, so if the good people here have any ideas, I'd love to hear them.
Thanks

Sean
Click to expand...

One one of my systems, I ran into similar symptoms after installing virtual
drive software. It wasn't apparent at first but eventually figured out that
the virtual drive software was insisting on using the first letter after
the letters of the hard drive partitions.

What I did to fix: Uninstalled the virtual drive software. The CDRW drive
reappeared. Used Disk Management to change the letter, leaving a span of
"blank" letters in between hard drive partitions and the CDRW drive. Then
reinstalled the virtual drive software.
 
Bloody brilliant. I had uninstalled the device from the hardware
manager a number of times, but never from the registry. Not sure why
it had a different result, but it did. I went to:
/System/CurrentControlSet/Control/Class/{4d36e965-e325-11ce-bfc1-08002be10318}


I removed REG_MULTI_SZ data type UpperFilters, and REG_MULTI_SZ data
type lowerFiltersHKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE wasn't there. I rebooted and
Windows picked up both my devices.

Thanks a million Jim.
 
Yeah I did install some virtual drive software, so this may have been
the problem. Jims solution (above) worked like a charm though, so I
guess I'll never know. Thanks for you input though!

Sean
 
I learned of this problem and the fix several years ago when a Roxio
installation took out my drives. I have seen it work time and time again.
Jim
 
Back
Top