Jason Burns’ Blog

I have been bitten, I have found a bug, and I have found the most ridiculous fix in the world. I installed Windows Vista Ultimate over Windows XP Pro without incident. I had the machine up and running in no time and all was right with the world.

I went to install Flight Simulator X and again, DVD-RW worked fine. Then, I go to install World of Warcraft, and my DVD-RW drive was missing. Not only did it not show in my computer, but it was missing from the device manager as well. Just to be sure, I rebooted and went into the bios utility to make sure the machine was still recognizing the drive and of course it was.

I did some cursory Google searching and came across a Microsoft Knowledgebase article that described two methods, the first was to remove a registry entry that didn’t exist in my machine. The second was to uninstall the drive from device manager, a task that is pretty difficult when the drive doesn’t show there.

I did have one stroke of luck by disabling the controller the drive was on, but that only worked once. I took the drive out of the machine, updated it’s firmware, and still had no luck.

After doing a little more research, I found the most unlikely fix, and it actually works. I sure hope it’s patched VERY soon, because it’s a silly fix. You put the desktop to sleep, when you wake it up, the DVD-RW magically reappears.

Crazy, I know. I am having Dawn (She works for MS) submit it as a bug to Microsoft, hopefully that will help get a fix out soon.

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