DVD drive not recognised on laptop.

Brum Man · 19 Aug 2006 at 00:16

I've having a bit of a problem with the DVD-RW in a friends computer. Basically I have just been cleaning up the computer to get rid of all the rubbish but in the mean time I seem to have nakered up the driver for the DVD burner, so much so that the computer doesn't even recognise that it's there :/

Now, as far as I know it shouldn't require a seperate driver as windows should have the drivers for optical drives as part of the installation? However, I can't even put the windows drive in to fix the installation as the DVD drive doesn't worrk!

Can anyone help? The laptop is an Evesham (unsure of the model), and the DVD drive is a Sony DVD RW DW-D56A according to the device manager.

Cheers.

benjo plz. · 19 Aug 2006 at 00:18

Go into control panel, administrative tools, computer management, disk management, and assign the drive a letter.

Brum Man · 19 Aug 2006 at 10:45

Cheers for the idea, but the drive doesn't appear in the list for me to assign it a letter, only the C drive is there.

When I try to look at the drive in the device manager the drive is listed there but it has a yellow circle over it with an exclamation mark in it.

masterk · 19 Aug 2006 at 10:51

Tried uninstalling it from device manager, then rebooting and letting Windows re-detect it?

Brum Man · 19 Aug 2006 at 11:09

Yep, just tried that. Uninstalled the drive then rebooted, windows picked up the drive but it still appears with an exclamation mark over it in device manager :/

I've done a bit of looking around and it seems to be a lot of other people that have had the same problem, but no seems to have a definite fix. Some people mention editing the registry key.

masterk · 19 Aug 2006 at 11:15

In the device properties does it say driver not loaded or could not start device?

Brum Man · 19 Aug 2006 at 11:21

It says

"Windows cannot load the device driver for this hardware. The driver may be corrupted or missing. (Code 39)"

theredguy · 19 Aug 2006 at 11:29

Instead of removing the drive itself remove the ide controller it is atatched to and then try a re-boot, this has worked for me in the past.

Brum Man · 19 Aug 2006 at 11:52

Mmm, I'm not really sure which one it's attached too, and don't really just want to start uninstalling random stuff!

Is it the windows driver that's corrupt?

Brum Man · 19 Aug 2006 at 12:09

How safe is it to do what's explained on this page?

http://support.packardbell.com/uk/item/index.php?i=topic_02125&ppn=PB24D00101

I've seen this suggested on a couple of other pages too.

I've just checked the registry and the "lowerfilter" appears but the "upperfilter" doesn't, could that be the problem?

M0KUJ1N · 19 Aug 2006 at 12:24

Yeah, just delete the lower filter key- its probably been left behind by a badly-behaved application uninstaller.

This fix has worked for people in the past- Im pretty sure I had a thread telling someone to do it a while ago but cant for the life of me find it

Brum Man · 19 Aug 2006 at 12:30

Ah ha, it's fixed it! Cheers!