My experience with "Missing DVD/CD-Rom drive."
Today I remember thinking how much I was looking forward to receiving a replacement DVD drive next week that I had found on e-bay. It’s an exact match of the one I have that’s been driving me crazy for a week.
My DVD drive just quit showing on my laptop which runs Vista Ultimate, nothing in device manager, nothing in disk management. I spent many hours reading hundreds of articles on the subject on the Internet, none of which were of any help as I didn’t have an upper or lower filter in my registry and creating a new sub-key as per Microsoft help page was of no use. Windows “Fix It” did not help and a couple of programs I downloaded turned out be only a lure to buy them which I refused to do. My DVD/CD-ROM was trying to work, I could hear it and see its light blinking when I inserted a disk. I removed the drive, and reinserted it – no help. Utter frustration brought me to the conclusion that my DVD drive had gone bad.
It being close to the end of the month, I decided to back up my files and registry, prior to which I always run scans in Malwarebytes, Spybot and Avast; nothing showed up as bad in the first two but Avast found one malware item “amcap.exe” which was moved to the virus chest. I restarted the laptop before doing my backups and out of curiosity took a look in device manager; my DVD drive was back! Inserted a dvd which opened with Quicktime, the default program, movie was on for a minute or two and then just went blank, DVD disappeared from device manager too; back to square one. Figured it had to be the dvd or Quicktime and ran a scan on the dvd from my desktop; it was ok. Ran an Avast scan on the laptop on the Quicktime folder and another complete scan on the system; nothing was found. The only thing left was to uninstall Quicktime which I did, – restart – DVD is back and working fine.
So, the removal of “amcap.exe” by Avast brought the DVD/CD-Rom back the first time, if only briefly and the uninstall of Quicktime brought it back the second time. Don’t know how the “amcap.exe” got associated with Quicktime (maybe through an update?); Quicktime has been on my laptop for years. I can do without it and just am glad the drive is back and thought my experience might be helpful to others; for me, the solution came completely out of left field. Anyone need a DVD/CD-Rom drive for a HP Pavilion laptop?
. I did a test with opti drive. As far as I can see it says it should read DVD. So could it be dirt? Or is opti drive wrong.? I cannot burn - it says there is no disk when there is
