Physical Drives missing - Normal solutions ineffective.

[Dactrius]

For a long time now I've been using Daemon Tools version v4.03 HE, but ever since I bought Rainbow 6 Vegas 2 I've had to uninstall it or the game won't start. Recently after uninstalling it again to play the game, my physical drives have stopped working (A DVD Drive and a CD-RW). I looked up a solution and found this page on these very forums. I used Microsoft's guided help from the link on that page and then even went into the registery myself to delete the lower filter and upper filter entries. The problem is my physical drives no longer show in Device Manager and the filter entries don't recreate themselves on a reboot. Even deleting the drives and restarting the computer doesn't work, only my virtual drives load. Windows just won't recognise the physical drives, it's like they're not even there.

On advise from an earlier thread on this forum, I downloaded ImgBurn and checked the filter driver load order and this is what I get: Click Me!

No solution I try seems to work, my physical drives may as well not be there. Any help on this would be appreciated, I'd really rather not have to resort to a format or something equally drastic.

[Underheaven]

Try renaming the lower and upper filter registry keys instead of deleting all the entries out of them. Also, goto device manager and look under CD/DVD drives. Are your real ones displayed there without errors or error icons? Then click properties on it and click drivers and see if it has no drivers being used because of an error, or some such message.

[Dactrius]

My upper and lower filter registry entries are no longer there. As per advice from a thread I linked, I deleted them and reboot the computer. Ever since I did they're just not there. I assume Windows was meant to recreate them when the system rebooted? It never did though.

My physical drives do not show in device manager. They did and had an error stating "This device could not start properly". Following some advise I got browsing Google, I deleted the drives from Device Manager and rebooted the computer. The physical drives have since not been detected by windows at all.

[Underheaven]

I assume Windows was meant to recreate them when the system rebooted?

Windows doesn't recreate them. The lack of those entries can be fixed once your drives appear again. Or you could even ignore it and use your drives and probably never notice any difference with the filter reg keys gone. Example to restore: you will want redbook as upperfilter which is part of standard windows configuration.

In terms of detecting your real hardware maybe choose option in device manager action menu (after clicking the top most name of your computer in the white area): 'Scan for hardware changes'

Also setupapi.log may be interesting (only look at the bottom of the file and you'll see dates every 20 lines maybe, use that to narrow down to when the problem occurred up until now).

Start menu, run, 
notepad %systemroot%\setupapi.log

p.s. What is your OS version (xp or vista or win2k) 32 or 64 bit processor? Are the real cd/dvd drives IDE or SATA. If IDE are there any sata drives in the system (i'm not sure why im asking, just curious)?

[Dactrius]

Scanning for hardware changes doesn't do anything unfortunately, except freeze after a while. As for the setupapi.log you mentioned, I'm not computer literate to know what it's for exactly but I did load it like you suggested and tried to glance through it. I couldn't really find much but my DVD drive was mentioned frequently and this was in there at one point (Today):

#-166 Device install function: DIF_INSTALLDEVICE.
#I123 Doing full install of "IDE\CDROMSONY_FYS3\4&18DCD8DE&0&1.0.0".
#I163 Device not started: Device has problem: 0x0a: CM_PROB_FAILED_START.
#I121 Device install of "IDE\CDROMSONY_FYS3\4&18DCD8DE&0&1.0.0" finished successfully.

I'm guessing according to that it's an IDE drive. There's mention of an SCSI CD drive too, so I guess I have one of each? I'm running on Windows XP, with service pack 2. I've got a 64 bit processor. As for the presence of SATA drives, only my hard disk is.

[Underheaven]

It sounds like web searching time for the messages in that log. You could try doing a reinstall of Service Pack 2, seems like some drivers could be missing on your windows install.

Edit: now that I think of it, windows xp restore points might come in handy to changing back to a date when the drives were still recognized- BUT i'm not an expert when it comes to restore points, in fact I know almost nothing about them :d .

Also, the SCSI drive stuff you see in the log are the fake drives that DAEMON Tools makes. The IDE will be your real ones. (off topic: DT Pro uses IDE and SCSI drives, DT lite uses SCSI drives)