Three weeks ago, I installed a spanking brand new LG DVD-Burner as an adjunct to my existing ASUS drive. The device was a dream! I burnt piles of DVDs daily with nary a hitch. Not a single platter ended up wasted. And even better- entire 1GB zip files get transferred in seconds.

Then the dream stopped two days ago. The LG simply stopped being detected. So did my Asus!

I mosied over to Device Manager and noticed a yellow warning icon next to both drives:

Windows cannot load the device driver for this hardware. The driver may be corrupted or missing. (Code 39)

Okay. No problem. Let me just uninstall both drivers and have an autodetection. Uh-oh. No dice. Both drives remained dead in the water. So I unscrewed my case (thank god it’s one of those Thermaltake cases with thumbscrews) and checked the cables. They were fine. No mouse nibbles. I closed the case and rebooted. Maybe the drives will magically reappear.

Oh man! Neither returned from AWOL state. Now I got worried. I can’t live without my burners!

I then checked windows update for new drivers. None there. So I visited driverguide and a handful of cd-rom forums. One helpful fella recommended downloading XP920918.EXE from Microsoft. This archive contains cutting edge drivers replacing antiquated Atapi.sys and a host of other controller files. Installation went without a hitch but my drives remained comatose.

I was ready to do a full reinstall when a fine fellow from Ireland sent me the following helpful hint:

Start Registry Editor (Start, Run and type in regedit then click)

Find “UpperFilters” and “LowerFilters” (and “UpperFilters.bak” “LowerFilters.bak”, if they exist) value under the following key in the registry, and delete it:

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

Quit Registry Editor.

It looked like a simple fix, but I went for it anyway.

Lo and behold! My drives came back! Woah. What a few registry tricks can do. Simple tweaks can do everything from fix DVD Rom drives to even register XP to bypass WGA!!

Further reading led me to discover that this problem plagues 7 out of 10 XP users due to automatic update settings in XP (as well as the installation of certain burning software). If you’re one of the poor afflicted folks, fire up the registry editor and do some hacking. It’s a cinch

Then be careful of what you install in the future.

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