How to Restore a Deactivated / Missing CD/DVD Drive [Troubleshoot ]

If your CD/DVD drive has disappeared from Windows Explorer and the system folder ‘My Computer’. A glance in the device manager shows that obviously there is some serious problem as the entries are marked with a yellow exclamation mark. This is also confirmed by opening ‘Properties’ in the context menu of the device as it reports “Error code 19” and an error in the registry.

This happens when you accidently deactivate your CD/DVD drive. It can be solved with one change to the registry.


The procedure is as follows..
Open the registry editor with ‘Start > Run’, ‘regedit’ and click ‘OK’

Go to the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}. 

In the right side of the window, delete both values ‘UpperFilters’ and ‘LowerFilters’.
To do that, select the successive entries, press [Del], and confirm the security query that will pop up.
After restarting your system, the drive will be available again.