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A colleague at work has a problem with his laptop which is running Vista Home Basic. This was preloaded when the laptop was bought earlier this year.

If a CD or DVD is loaded the drive runs but the files can not be accessed.
In device manager the DVD drive shows a driver problem.

"Windows cannot load the device driver for this hardware. The driver may be corrupted or missing."

Since I have never seen drivers for CD/DVD drives that are not part of Windows there is no way I know of download the driver files if missing or corrupt.

If the drive is uninstalled in Device Manager then the PC rebooted ( Crapsta is soooooooooo sssssslllllllllllllllooooooooowwwwwwwwww - I am writing this on a P3 1GHz laptop running Windows 2000 which is much faster at loading, opening control panel etc. ) the drive is shown but with the problem again. No files are reported as missing or corrupt during booting.

Has anyone else had or heard of this problem?

Any suggestions ( other than replace Crapsta with XP, which isn't an option as only Vista Business can be downgraded to XP Pro plus I don't want the job of doing it anyway ) will be appreciated.

Some suggestions.

1. Try windows update, see if it detects a new or better driver
2. Make sure you have the very latest Service Pack installed.
3. Find the device in device manager and tell it to update the driver.
4. run the system file checker to make sure nothing is corrupt. To do this click the start button, then run, and type "SFC" into the prompt.
5. Check the system event logs, to see what is being reported.
6. As a last resort, insert the vista install disc and reinstall the operating system over the top. It should correct any software issues. Obviously backup any important files first, just in case.

Its possible that some third party driver, typically from DVD writing software or disc copy protections found on games, has overwritten the default driver.

Thank you - a few things to look at.

SP1 is loaded and various updates but I will check if bang up to date.
I tried updating driver and Windows said correct and latest driver installed.

I hope I don't have to resort to the last option. Also don't know if he actually has a Vista CD as there looks to be recovery partition on the hard drive.
I got caught once with a manufacturers recovery disc set that was an image of the hard drive as it left the factory, not an installation disk set. Before I realised the hard drive was being re-written.

Install service pack 2, hopefully that will fix it.

You should not be cautious about installing any updates or service packs, on home systems they should always be installed unless you have some old software which will absolutely not run. They almost always provide increased stability and better security, by having exploits in the OS patched.

As for the CD drive, there is a problem where the registry can get corrupt and cause the issue you are seeing. If you download the file below from Microsoft

http://download.microsoft.com/download/ ... t50027.msi

Run it and then reboot the laptop, hopefully that should solve the issue.

[quote]You should not install updates and service packs as a fix-all[/quote]

Updates are created to fix bugs and exploits in specific code, so there is no reason why they can not provide a fix, as that is normally what they are supplied to do. It is not better to leave your system alone, otherwise you leave yourself wide open to existing exploits which the very update would fix. The exception to this is in business environments where in the very unlikely event that something is 'broken' with the exploit that you run a risk of downtime.

[quote]A corrupt registy will not cause your CD/DVD to malfunction like this. That's very unlikely.[/quote]

No its not, a corrupt registry can break lots of thinks, including how the IDE controller is identified to the system, i've had this happen a lot with XP, where it would default by harddrives to PIO mode and my CD drive wouldnt work. Removing the registry entries, meant that the IDE controller would get picked back up on reboot and correctly identified as using DMA instead of PIO.

The patch from microsoft that i mentioned in my previous post, is a patch that has been used by various people to fix a corrupt registry setting that causes the CD/DVD drive to be identified as having a yellow exclamation mark in device manager and not showing up in windows.

Doing a search on google for "MicrosoftFixit50027.msi" would have shown you that many other people have also had the same problem as the OP and it was fixed with this patch from microsoft.

Thank you folks - I will post progress here.

I did not realise there was now SP2 for Vista, maybe that is installed - I will look again.
The laptop is regularly used on line so should be up to date unless for some reason automatic updating is disabled.

If that registry file works it will be great and quick, the yellow triangle is what is shown against the drive in device manager.