Guys and Gals, Before any of you go to the work of researching and solving this question, let me say that I have already solved it. Or rather, Google solved it. Seems this is a more common problem that I thought. I had to go into regedit and delete the upperfilters value and the lowerfilters value. Doing this brought back the DVD to "my computer" and a simple uninstall and reinstall brought back the CD/RW. Next time I will do the research before asking. Dick At 03:31 PM 8/6/2007, you wrote: >I tried to run a CD today and the drive spun up, the lights blinked, >but it would not start. I looked in "my computer" and neither of my >optical drives were shown. Hoping it was as simple as a bad cable, I >changed out the EIDE cable which fixed nothing, so I tried every >combination hookup I could on the primary and secondary EIDE cables, >to no avail. I looked at the device manager and both drives had the >dreaded yellow circle with exclamation point. Under "properties", I >got the following message: "Windows cannot start this hardware >device because its configuration information (in the registry) is >incomplete or damaged (code 19)". I then tried a system restore >back to the earliest date available, as I don't know for sure when >this problem started, but that did not fix the problem. Any ideas >on what to do next? I would do a repair installation of XP, but >without an optical drive, I cannot do that. The system is a P4, 2.8 >GHz, Avit V17 MB running XP Pro SP2. Thanks in advance for any help >this great list can offer > >Dick > > PCBUILD maintains hundreds of useful files for download > visit our download web page at: > http://freepctech.com/downloads.shtml PCBUILD's List Owners: Bob Wright<[log in to unmask]> Drew Dunn<[log in to unmask]>