N Ideologics

Windows XP has had mysterious bugs from the day Microsoft said go, some serious and others just more… annoying. One such bug is corruption of the generic driver used for CD and DVD drives.

One day, you may just find that your CD/DVD drive has vanished. When you check in Device Manager, you see your drives have little yellow exclamations by them – what’s up with that?

If you look further, you might come across something similar to:

“Windows cannot load the device driver for this hardware. The driver may be corrupted or missing. (Code 39)”

So, Windows can’t load the driver. Is it a corrupt driver? Well, as far as I can tell, this problem is more frequently caused by CD/DVD burning software such as Roxio or Nero “latching on” to the driver. The system files that these application suites add sometimes fail and inadvertently cause the driver to fail.

Fixing it is actually a quite simply task, we just need to remove what the burning software has added to the driver.

Follow these instructions:

1. Load the registry editor. (click Start, click Run, type “regedit” and click OK)
2. Using the navigation on the left, find your way to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}
3. Here you should find two keys named “UpperFilters” and “LowerFilters”. Double click UpperFilters, delete any value stored, and click OK. Do the same for LowerFilters.
4. Close the registry editor.
5. Restart your computer.
6. Your drives should be usable again.

An important note: You might need to reinstall any CD or DVD recording software you’ve installed.

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