Thursday, July 5, 2012

CD/DVD Drive is missing in Windows 7

Both of my optical disc drives stopped working recently. When I looked under Device Manager, I received this error for the devices:

Windows cannot start this hardware device because its configuration information (in the registry) is incomplete or damaged. (Code 19)

I knew the driver was fine, but I had gone so long before discovering the issue, that I didn't know what I did that was related to my problem. I was pretty sure it had something to do with adding or removing software to my computer, which I had done recently. After rebooting in safe mode and still getting the error, I took a look around on the internet and found some good information. I knew what didn't cause the error, so it wasn't hard to narrow it down. In my case I just need to get into the registry at:

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

and delete the UpperFilters and LowerFilters values. After a reboot, everything was fine.

What a stupid error.