My DVD drive isn't recognized :( Help?

[meteorstorm42]

All of a sudden, it's not showing up in the device manager.
When I use the drive's eject key, it opens fine.
When I put in a disk, it spins.
When I use the keyboard eject key I get this grammatically-weird message:

Cannot open the tray of the optical drive.
Please try again to eject the tray after close the all using softwares or after shutdown the system and then start Windows...

I searched around a bit and found out that I may need to remove "UpperFilters" and "LowerFilters" from the registry.
That didn't help :/

Let me check if it's showing up in the BIOS...

[reaborg]

What Vaio model and Windows OS do you have?

Could be this (or maybe not): Did you check to see if the dvd is turned off by Vaio's Power management software? If its off, it won't show up on device manage, and the keyboard eject key will not work. You may need to manually turn it back on, or fix a screwy setting that is keeping it from turning back on. If this is the problem, perhaps try re-installing the vaio software?

[meteorstorm42]

It's a Z, running Vista Home Premium.

I keep messing around with stuff, and I don't know if that has anything to do with it...
In the past, hitting eject when it was turned off would make the Power Management software turn it on, and then eject it.

[reaborg]

well if you don't want to debug, your best bet is to re-install the software, or re-install the entire system.

[meteorstorm42]

I don't mind trying to debug, but I'm not sure where to go next...

[reaborg]

Check in the power management that the "Auto Off" feature for the DVD/CD Drive is not enabled and that its set for Power On?

[ScuderiaConchiglia]

I don't mind trying to debug, but I'm not sure where to go next...

Did you install any third party CD or DVD burner software? There was an issue with some of these apps right after Vista came out, where the app installer wrote some bogus registry entries. If you do a search on this forum for "missing DVD registry" (without the quotes) you should find what info about that. It is a simple registry fix, if that is the issue you have. There is also a Microsoft knowledge base article that applies to Win XP and Vista: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314060


Gary

[John Ratsey]

Which notebook? Is the ODD connected via IDE or USB? The latter is used on some models to make it easier to turn off the power. If it is IDE then try uninstalling the secondary IDE channel then let Windows redetect the hardware. This can sometimes flush out connection problems.

John