Friday, February 22, 2008

Problem with CD/DVD drive in Vista

I am not proud of having my inaugural blog post on how to fix a bug in Windows Vista.
I have been using Vista 64 and have encountered a few problems.
It started with my old logitech webcam, which I cannot find a vista driver for. I bought a Microsoft Lifecam to replace it, and, guess what, the thing didn't work right out of the box. I had to run a patch to fix something on the USB drivers of Vista 64 bits. It worked. It was funny to buy a brand new Microsoft peripheral incompatible with Vista 64.
The next problem I had was with my CD/DVD drive. After some windows update it appeared with a warning sign in Device Manager, saying that the driver was missing. I spent several minutes trying to find a more up-to-date driver for my drive (TSSTcorp TS-L632H - came in a Inspiron 1520). Also, my U3 thumb drive didn't work.

It turns out that the solution for this problem has nothing to do with driver, after all. All you have to do is
a) Go to the registry and find [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}
b) Make sure the class = CDROM
c) Delete both UpperFilter and LowerFilter keys.
d) reboot.

After I did this, both my CD/DVD drive and my U3 thumb drive (which works like a CD) work fine!

Other than these, and not being able to run my McAfee Viruscan on Vista, I haven't had any problems with Vista 64.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Gustavo, I tried your solution here, and also tried it again directly in Windows Help (there's a similar solution regarding the registry filters), and nothing worked. Here's the problems I am having:

The computer I have is only a couple of months old (four, tops). Great HP Pavilion with two DVD burning drives, one of which can play back Blu-ray discs (although I haven't used it for that yet). Have probably a half-dozen programs which can burn a DVD (which I usually do from an ISO file), and I'm having a couple of problems here:

1. Both of my drives are supposed to be locked from being opened during the burning process. I usually use DVD Decrypter to burn, but have also used ImgBurn and Nero to burn discs.....but I get a message box telling me "Unable to lock volume for exclusive access. Reason: Access denied" (something like that). I click the option to ignore to continue with the disc burn and it works......but how can I set things here in Vista (yeah....f**kin' Vista again!) to stop that message from showing up?

2. Big problem with the Blu-ray compatible drive (it only reads BR, doesn't burn them) is that particular drive can read and play a disc (either store-bought or one already burned).....but now it can't BURN a disc (no matter what brand I use, and I usually always use Verbatim, but I also just tried a TDK disc). It not only seems to take a much longer-than-needed time to recognize a blank disc when I put one into that drive, but when attempting to burn (and I always use nothing but DVD+R for burning movies) it doesn't work. I then have to abort the process, but the blank disc is still useable....I just have to burn in the other drive. However, when testing it with a rewritable DVD+RW, it will burn.....but when doing so with DVD Decrypter, that program's memory buffer doesn't get filled up as it should (actually, the buffer SHOULD be fillled in any such program when burning). Anyway, when using a rewritable disc, it burns the movie but the information line for Write Retries immediately starts filling up and goes way past 25,000!! Also, in this burning drive I'm having problems with, I can't seem to erase/format a disc because of this damned problem. Also, when I insert a blank DVD+R into the drive, DVD Decrypter tells me the "book type" is CD-ROM, which is nonsense....it should be DVD-ROM, so obviously there's misinformation in there somewhere.

I'm trying to find answers online before I have to disconnect the damn computer to take it in to the Geek Squad at Best Buy (at least we're covered for two years on this thing). This is pissing me off now....my partner specifically made sure this new computer had two burning drives in it because of all the disc burns I do....and now I only have ONE burning drive that works.

HELP!