Vista - DVD drive has vanished

HP laptop (dv2000 series) running Vista Home Premium SP1 32bit - the DVDRW drive has completely vanished from "My Computer" and the Device Manager and Explorer in general. The drive itself is mechanically sound and totally functional (I can boot to CDs w/o problems). I used the info in Adrynalyne's thread (at this link) to fix the drive, rebooted the PC and it worked. Once. After another reboot, the drive was gone again. So I ran the fix again, but it didn't work. I have tried viewing 'hidden devices' while in the Device Manager and still no CD/DVD entry. I have run the Add New Hardware Wizard, still no CD/DVD drive. I hooked up a USB DVDRW drive and it worked, and I was hoping it would cause the on-board DVDRW drive to 'kick in', but it didn't. I ran the tool FixWin which has a CD/DVD fix, but it didn't work either (yeah, I know it says it's for Win7 only but I checked the developer's page and it is for Vista and Win7 ). So, I'm about out of ideas.... any suggestions will be appreciated!!! THANKS!

 

Not really possible with Vista like it is with WinXP.... however, there are some other "repair" features available when booting to the Vista install disc, and I haven't tried those just yet.... I'm going to try 'em now, then I'll look at maybe pulling the drive and booting without it..... thanks Halo!

 

Well, problem solved! :celebrate

I booted to a Vista ERD6.0/PE disc (also known as MSDaRT or MicroSoft Diagnostic And Recovery Toolset), and used the MMC to check all the system drivers and their respective startup settings (I probably could have done this within Vista and not requiring booting a ERD/PECD LOL ). It turns out that one of the system CD drivers was set to "disabled", and the other (the cdfs.sys driver = CD File System) was set to "manual" which seemed odd. I changed both of 'em to "System" and rebooted to the Vista desktop . . . and VOILA' . . . the DVDRW is now 100% functional!! How/why these CD drivers were set as they were is a mystery, but I got it sorted. Hopefully this will help someone else in the future.


[dlb]

(I just checked - and it seems that I cannot access the same driver list in the MMC from within Vista; maybe I wasn't looking the same place, I don't know, but in the Vista MMC, there is NO driver list and the drivers I manipulated aren't listed in "Services" or in the Device Manager even with "Hidden Devices" enabled)