WARNING: I CANNOT AND WILL NOT BE HELD RESPONSIBLE IF YOU DELETE SOMETHING AND YOU CAN NO LONGER ACCESS YOUR COMPUTER.  PLEASE BE AWARE THAT THIS IS SOMETHING THAT A TRAINED PROFESSIONAL WILL USUALLY DO FOR YOU.  IF YOU WANT TO DO IT YOURSELF, PLEASE KNOW THAT YOU RUN THE RISK OF DAMAGING YOUR COMPUTER.  DELETING THE WRONG THING FROM THE REGISTRY CAN LEAVE YOUR COMPUTER UNABLE TO BOOT INTO WINDOWS.  IF YOU’RE NOT SURE ABOUT DOING THIS PROCEDURE, I HIGHLY SUGGEST TAKING IT INTO A PROFESSINAL REPAIR SHOP WHERE SOMEONE WHO IS CERTIFIED CAN DO IT FOR YOU.  THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION.

Wow, this is pretty bad. I have a client’s Sony laptop in which she just purchased probably not even a week ago. Right now I’m trying to resolve a missing DVD-Rom drive after inserting a movie or doing anything with the DVD-Rom drive. I put Google to good use and found that there are many others having the same exact problem. This is pitiful as there is no fix in sight. Now that is just wrong, plain wrong, and more wrong and more wrong. I’m rather upset at the fact that Microsoft would let this slip for so long. Also there isn’t much talk about it other than many posts on the Vista newsgroups. I’m wondering why no bigger site has bothered to report on this flaw in Vista.

This is just another reason to chock towards not upgrading to Vista. I’m still running XP and plan to for some time. I’m not bashing Vista, there are its pros over XP but at the same time there seem to be much more cons.

I’m going to go do more research on this and if I figure something out you know I’ll post it here. Otherwise, if you find something out, feel free to share that info with me. Thanks.

UPDATE

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11­CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}

Apparently it seems that this is an age old fix for even XP systems. If you venture to the registry key above by doing the following steps:

1. Click on the start menu.
2. If this is a Vista machine in the search box type in “regedit” without the quotation marks.
3. Maximize the HKLM and then go ahead and browse until you reach the key listed above.
4. In the right panel you’ll see something along the lines of “UpperFilter” and “LowerFilter” you want to click on each “filter” key and hit delete. Click yes when it asks to confirm if you wish to delete the key.
5. Restart Windows.
6. Let me know if this works.

UPDATE: 10/27/07

In the case that you’ve deleted both the upper and lower filters and also removed the device through device manager and you still are unable to read CDs or DVDs, this may indicate that your drive is bad and or your motherboard is bad.

If your computer is relatively new, I would think that it is a drive problem.  If your computer is relatively old, then I would think it may be a bad motherboard.

A good way to check if your drive is still good is to “boot” from it.  What I mean by this is to restart your computer, find your boot menu and tell it to boot from CD.

You will need a bootable CD.  I often use a Windows installation disk.  Or if you have something like Memtest or the Hitachi Drive Fitness test you can use those.

Update 2/4/10

If you are still having problems, try installing this Gear driver update.  This apparently plays a role with the way iTunes and Vista sees the optical drive.

http://www.gearsoftware.com/downloads.php?dir=updates/windows/drivers/&file=Driver_Installer_x86_x64.exe

Please if this solution helped you take some time to donate a little something. Even if it’s just a dollar. It really helps me to keep the site going. I really appreciate it.