How to fix broken CD/DVD drives in WinBlows

Author: erics, Posted October 7th, 2009 at 7:50:14pm

I ran into this craziness today and learned this trick from Dean at Dell support:

1. In regedit, navigate to the following hive:
   [code]
   * HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
   * SYSTEM
   * CurrentControlSet
   * Control
   * Class
   * {4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}
   [/code]
2. This folder is the DVD/CD-ROM Drive Class Description in the registry. Look for any of the following names in the right hand column:
   [code]
   * UpperFilters
   * LowerFilters
   * UpperFilters.bak
   * LowerFilters.bak
   [/code]
3. If any of the above keys shown in step 4 are listed, right-click on them and choose Delete
4. After deleting the keys, close the Registry Editor
5. Go to device manager and delete the optical drives (uninstall will work too)
6. Restart computer
7. Open My Computer and check to see if your CD or DVD drives have returned. You may also want to open Device Manager and verify that the yellow exclamation and error code on the CD or DVD drive is gone

Categories: How-To's, Technology Tags: regedit, winblows, windows