Icrontic is proud to reintroduce the Office Hours series of articles. Each week we’ll take a look at a common problem in Windows or often-used software and nail down a quick fix for it. This week we explore the case of the incredible disappearing optical drives.
If your CD/DVD-ROM has a yellow triangle in the Windows device manager, there is a good chance it can be fixed in a hurry.
The Problem
While Windows XP is easily the most popular Microsoft operating system to date, it is not without its own quirks. Amongst the more common ones is a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM that has suddenly stopped reading discs inside of Windows.
The primary symptom of this problem is presented in the device manager by way of a yellow exclamation point on all optical drives configured in the system.
Secondary symptoms include optical drives that have disappeared from Windows Explorer or drives that report the following error messages when their properties are consulted from the device manager:
The device is not working properly because Windows cannot load the drivers required for this device (Code 31).
A driver for this device was not required, and has been disabled (Code 32 or Code 31).
Your registry might be corrupted. (Code 19)
The Fix
Commonly called the “code 31 error” or “code 39 error,” the culprit for this nuisance falls to two Windows registry entries known as the “UpperFilters” and “LowerFilters” for optical drives. These two registry settings are filter drivers which contain information and settings for the system’s CD/DVD-ROMs. Programs that use optical storage (such as burning software) can modify and unintentionally corrupt these settings which renders Windows incapable of communicating with the drives.
With a little elbow grease in the registry, we can get Windows to restore the correct entries by deleting the broken ones.
Step 1:
Fire up the Windows Registry Editor by going to the start menu, pressing the run button, and typing regedit followed by a tap of the enter key.
Step 2:
Start by locating registry class number {4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318} in the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class directory as seen in the figure below:
Click on all the directories highlighted in blue to get find the registry entries we need to delete.
Step 3:
The right pane will become active with settings — including our offending registry entries — for the system’s optical drives. Any given system may contain one or both filter drivers, so don’t be concerned if one of the two is missing. Right click UpperFilters and LowerFilters as available and hit delete.
Post-mortem
Now that you’ve blasted the culprit, shut down the Windows Registry editor and reboot your PC. These registry entries will be recreated with a right and proper version that should restore access to your optical drives.
Check back next Wednesday for the next edition of Office Hours where we’ll tackle another common irritation with Windows XP or some of today’s most popular software!
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