Disappearing Optical Drives (DVD/CD-ROM) in Windows XP Professional x64

 Carlos Atashian once again provides some great information this time concerning disappearing Optical Disk drives (DVD/CD-ROM) in Windows XP Professional x64.

This is usually related to a couple of registry keys that somehow need to be deleted so that Windows rebuilds them properly on the next reboot.

BACKUP YOUR REGISTRY FIRST!!!
Click Start > Click Run Type in "regedit" (without qoutes)

Navigate to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet001\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}

Highlight the "upperFilters" and "LowerFilters" if any and go to edit-delete.

I also did this same in:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet003\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}

It seems like you have to delete de upperfilters and lowerfilters keys in all of the CurrentControlSet00X branches.

Don't forget to reboot.
Carlos

Additional tips and words of precaution from Darrell Gorter (MSFT):

Let's be a little careful here and understand what is happening before we delete those entries.
We can break some installed applications and some functionality if we just delete the entire value.
The upper and lower filters entries are available for viewing in device manager.

Open the properties of the device.
In this case the CD-ROM or DVD drive.
Choose the details tab.
Scroll down the list.
There will be 4 entries that come into play.
Device Upper Filters
Device Lower Filters
Class Upper Filters
Class Lower Filters
What is recorded in the registry is listed under each item?

Applications have installed these filter drivers which are attached to these devices. For example CD-Burning or DVD-Burning software will install filter drivers most of the time. There can be any number of filter drivers installed per device. If we just delete the regisry entries we will potentially break some applications or functionality.

I would recommend backing up or recording the entries first from each line so that we can replace them if we find other items are broken. More than likely we only want to remove one of the filter drivers that is causing the issue, not everything under the key. Plus if we can identify which items specifically to delete we can leave everything else in place and still working.

If we just delete the entire key we may not easily be able to recover with out installing software. We could cause more issues than the one we are trying to resolve. For example you delete imapi filter entry in this case which is the cd-burning  in Windows XP. You also delete the redbook filter entry which affects reading some cds.

So it would be good to put some caution around this so that if we need to we can recover if needed.
Thanks,
Darrell Gorter[MSFT]