Dispatches from Safe Mode: Optical Disllusionment

I’ve been relatively inactive online for the past two weeks. (I’ve been on, but not participating much.) What follows is about 50% of the reason why.
13 days ago I went to burn some CD’s for work… and discovered I couldn’t. My optical drive was missing.

No, not stolen… missing. Not showing up in my computer– and completely unlisted in the device manager.

This is a pretty common problem for Windows users. In fact, it’s existed for 9 years, dating from early versions of XP. Optical drives under XP don’t require a driver to run– the operating system talks to them directly with nothing to configure. Unfortunately, some pieces of very standard software (Nero, iTunes… even Microsoft’s Zune software!) insert themselves between the drive and the operating system. And if the registry entries that muck with this ‘innate driverless connection,’ it can become a massive headache to fix it… because it’s no longer as simple as reinstalling the driver. (Bugger!)

This is what I’ve been poking at for two weeks, in increasingly radical ways. Sometimes uninstalling the offending software fixes the problem. Sometimes a registry patch from Microsoft will fix the problem. (About 50% of the time, I’d estimate.)
Sometimes a good rogering in Safe Mode and changing settings does it. Or updating the bios. Installing major OS upgrades. Uninstalling system components (not necessarily related to optical drives.) Installing certain optional components for Microsoft Office that are integrated into the OS. Registry cleaners. …sometimes.

Basically, this bug has existed for 9 years. There is no fix that works reliably. The registry patch that Microsoft provides will often work once… only to have the drive vanish again on reboot (or more mystifyingly, when awakening form sleep mode!) It will generally NOT work a second time.

Frustratingly, this is not a drive problem. The bios can still ’see’ the drive, it will be checked at startup and can be booted from. It’s when the computer initializes Windows that your drive seem to vanish– no longer even registering hardware changes if the drive is physically removed!

What IS established is that IF you can make your optical drive reappear while bludgeoning your system… you must take GREAT CARE, lest it vanish again as quickly as it came! Specifically, you should insert a CD-Rom AND a region-encoded DVD into the drive, as this seems to somehow “anchor” it so Windows does not once again lose it.

After re-awakening my computer from sleep mode an hour ago– my optical drive is duddenly back, for the third time since it vanished. I am now attempting to insert as many disc combinations as I can think of before restarting my computer in the hopes that it does not vanish again.

I have reamed my operating system backwards and sideways in the past two weeks trying to get exactly this result (after believing I’d had it fixed two other times.) But today it simply… showed up. I hadn’t even done anything today! No registry patches, no software changes… nothing! I am humbled before this, for it now becomes clear that what I have practices is not software debugging, but voodoo. And now I make sacrifice to the optical device gods, trying to find a region and disc combination that will gladden its heart so it no longer leaves me in famine.

I never appreciated how often I use that damn drive! But since it went down… I’ve wanted to burn or read something at least twice a day. I stare at my shelf full of DVD’s and realize I may never be able to watch them without pirating them. (When faced with chronic examples of this problem, it’s not uncommon for computer companies such as HP to advise their customers to BUY A NEW DRIVE. Yes, to get around a software mis-configuration problem.)

I do not know what caused my optical drive to come back. I have faced this same problem under XP (where it was less recalcitrant) but here, in increasing order of likelihood are the new things I DID do today that may have caused the drive to reappear.

•I played a video using FLVPlayer instead of VLCPlayer. I also accidentally attempted to use the Adobe video player. This was the first time either program had been open in almost a year.
•I accidentally installed (and then uninstalled) the software informer software.
•I attached a new USB mouse to my system. (a mini-mouse!) Unlike many mice, the OS did not immediately recognize it, and had to install a generic driver to address the hardware.

That last seems promising, in that it triggered a ‘hardware changes’ event. I noticed the drive was back about 30 minutes after. It was completely new hardware which had never touched this computer before, hence the moment of unfamiliarity.

I hope this list may he useful to others in the future, either to myself or to others with this same problem.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to set a restore point in my system, reboot and hope my optical drive is still here when I get back.