DVD Drive not Working

[JimboUK]

This may not fix it but it's worth a try before you pay out for a new one. Go to your device manager, find the DVD drive and uninstall it. Reboot and let Windows find the device and reinstall it.

[DarkeWolf]

Its a registy error. in most cases trying to reinstall the device itself won't work. What you need to address is the registry itself. You can try to do this by uninstalling the program that installed the drivers. Like Nero, roxio, or whichever program you ran the disk for. You are however, going to want to also uninstall the registry entries. I'd recommend a program like total uninstall or revo uninstall for this. Or, running a free app like ccleaner after doing the uninstall. Then re-running the install cd again. This is, however... problematic if you only have ONE optical drive on the comp. In such a case you would need to DL a version of the program off the 'net. Or try to copy the cd onto something like a usb stick, on another computer.

 

In the worst case scenario, you'd need to edit your registry via regedit.exe http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q314060

 

Definitely wish you good luck ;)

[DarkZerker]

I did the http://support.micro...b;EN-US;q314060 thing and it didn't fix it. Help?

[DarkeWolf]

hrm, sounds like you have a stubborn case here :(

Did you try doing a reinstall of the software that you used to install the drivers?

Have you gone to HP's site, in their support section to see if they have hardware/firmware updates for your particular drive that this model has in it?

the splat (icon) next to the problematic device in device manager... is it a " ! " or an " X " ?

 

sometimes stuff like this can be caused by spyware, have you run a thurough scan on your system for nasties? Using virus scanners AND malware scanners like malwarebytes, spybot SD, ad-aware, and housecall? (housecall is a free ONLINE virus scanner offered by trendmicro. use "housecall antivirus" as your search parameter and make sure the links include trendmicro.)

 

Doing a rollback via system restore can be tricky, because in a case like this, you dont know when the problem actually started. Only when you noticed the symptom. So you may not be rolling back to the time when the problem actually happened. And that restore point could be gone, depending on how long ago the cause happened.

[TheTerminator2004]

Do DVD drives actually have drivers? Every single disc drive I've ever seen has always just used the standard I/O interface - which means no drivers need to be installed to use it, and it can be used in any operating system automatically. External drives which connect via USB may be an exception to this rule, but otherwise, I find it hard to believe that it requires drivers to be installed.

 

Disc drives usually only last a few years before breaking in my experience - chances are, yours has reached the end of it's life. Windows has just happened to detect a problem with the drive, and is misreporting it as a broken driver. Just buy a new one - they only cost £10-15.

[DarkZerker]

I went ahead and did a system restore and it works fine as of today. Will it last?

[DarkeWolf]

awesome! well, I'm glad to hear that you got it sorted out! I would recommend going ahead and making a new system restore, at your current point, so that you can go back to it if the issue pops up again. I'd also recommend making a copy of your registry (backups) as well, just in case. So that you can have a backup that won't be overwritten in x amount of time. Just export it to a different location on your computer, cd disk (not recommended in this particular case for obvious reasons) usb stick, or whatnot.

http://windowsxp.mvps.org/registry.htm method one is how to manually make the system restore point. method 2 and three are for backing up the registry itself ;)