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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Dissapearing random drive here too, not found in device manager or disk management. iTunes is installed and I have latest updates with Vista Ultimate.
Sleep then back on does not resolve issue.
The only way to fix it is a reboot until the drive feels like hiding again >_<
For everyone that is trying to figure out why their dvd drive or hd is missing after sleep. This should fix everything. I started having the problem after upgrading to Vista Ultimate from premium.
You should find a program folder “Intel Matrix Storage Manager” I found this when I bought my Laptop and checked it out and it worked fine, it reported all drives were running fine. After the upgrade it could not find the drives.
But it did allow me to open the help menu wich had a link to “Intel” web site. I downloaded a newer version, installed it, and wouldn’t you know it it fixed everything. My System even started running faster then ever.
Why this isn’t posted by Microsoft I don’t know. Hope this finds everyone that needs it and we can all go back to enjoying the world on our pc’s.
Thomas, thanks for sharing, but it didn’t work on my HP Presario V3700 with Vista Home Edition laptop. I have upgraded to the latest Intel Matrix Storage 8.9. but still my dvd drive is missing.
HP laptop with Nvidia chipset having this problem. Have Vista 32bit with SP2 and all other updates installed. Installed latest BIOS and chipset drivers from HP’s site. Laptop has an IDE drive interface. I tried a CDROM and it works, but tried multiple DVDRW and DVDROM drives and none work. As soon as you put a CD in the drive, it disappears. USB DVD drive works. No filter stuff in the registry. Putting it to sleep does not bring it back. Only comes back after reboot.
Hey Guys,
I’ve had this problem too. Has anyone done a virus scan?? I got win32:swizzor – dvd dumb was in the file name.
I’m using Vista home premium – avast anti-virus free edition.
I’ll post again once scan has finished.
Ok, I have this issue as well, but it only happens when I insert a commercial DVD movie. Any other home DVD movies I have made work fine, but when inserting a DVD movie the drive stops working and I get en Event error “The device, \Device\CdRom0, is not ready for access yet.” The registry solution did not work, and so far nothing else has worked. I even recovered the entire OS to its original state as purchased and that didn’t help. Oddly enough, some comm DVD movies will work, and some won’t. The only way to recover the drive is to reboot. In some cases, the DVD will be read normally but in others inserting the DVD movie will always cause the drive to crash. After 2yrs one might think the MS would come up with a reliable solution, but no, they are more worried about making the bucks changing XP to Vista to 7 and to whatever else they come up with (I would suggest Windows Crap for the next release) so we all have to keep upgrading not only their software but other vendor’s. I have spent more time upgrading here and there and fixing issues than actually enjoying my computer. What a shame of a company, thanks to the world for open source!
i have a HP Pavilion AMD Turion 64 bit Win Vista invisible cd/dvdrom laptop.i have never found a fix for this gone baby gone problem and If anyone evr resolves it ,PLEASE post alink.