At 13:18 04/28/06, Kay Huff wrote:
>I have an unusual problem.  My laptop has just stopped reading the CD
>Drive...
>
>I called tech support who walked me through some things, one of which
>was to see if the computer would boot from a system disk. It DID boot,
>so I was told it IS reading the disk...
>
>The only solution ...was to reformat and reinstall the OS.
>I REALLY do NOT want to do this if I can avoid it.


Hi Kay

I had similar symptoms with my main Windows 2000 computer. (Neither
CD or DVd drive would read.) But I could boot from the DVD drive.
There is a Microsoft article mentioning that WinXP and Win2k share
this problem. (You didn't say which version of Windows you use.
See <http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314060/EN-US/>.

The problem can occur after an update to or removal of third party
CDROM or DVDROM burning software. Or, a recent security patch for
Windows Media Player affects the way Windows reads CDs and this
patch can cause these same effects.

Here's a more detailed version of the Registry fix described in
the above Microsoft article. I don't see that you have anything
to loose by trying this. It worked for me and didn't cause any
side effects!

Open Regedit (use the Start, Run menu) and navigate to

HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFCl-087002BEl0318}

(Note that HKLM is short for HKey_LOCAL_MACHINE.)

In the left pane of the Regedit window, highlite this key by left
clicking (once) on {4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFCl-087002BEl0318}.

In the right pane of the regedit viewer you'll find two subkeys
called "UpperFilters" & "LowerFilters". Delete the values for these
subkeys. (For example, right click on Upperfilters and choose Modify
from the menu that appears. In the small data window that appears,
drag your cursor to highlite everything (all the numbers) and hit
the delete key. You should be left only with 0000. Do the same
thing for Lowerfilters.) Close Regedit and reboot the computer.

See if your CD-Rom drive works now.

Regards,
Bill

              The NOSPIN Group is now offering Free PC Tech
                     support at our newest website:
                          http://freepctech.com