Suddenly today I noticed that my DVD drive/burner was no longer available to me. In Device Manager the device was shown, but Windows had a problem: “Windows cannot load the device driver for this hardware. The driver may be corrupted or missing. (Code 39)” Uninstalling and re-installing the device didn’t help, in fact the driver installation process ended with status “failed”.
So I looked around and I got lucky to find this forum post, which actually solved the problem (even without a reboot on Vista RC1). Amazing. As I never trust these forum people to leave the URL intact forever, I’m copying the text of that post here, if only for my personal help if that should ever happen to me again :-)
I had a similar error, and the problem also showed on on the ‘virtual drives’ with the error in the device manager. I know that the drives work fine, and the virtual drives being messed up further proves it is some type of driver error. I uninstalled the drives.. rebooted, reinstalled the drivers, rebooted and still have the same error message.. EXCEPT the error code is 41, not 39. While reformatting and reinstalling windows would probably fix the problem, it would be a lot easier to just fix this problem without going through migration of the settings for each user to the new installation, and installing the 50 GB worth of programs installed on the system. (and imagine activating a lot of them over again also (eg Adobe CS2, Acrobat 7, Install Shield 11, etc…) To fix this problem, I performed the following: Start Registry Editor (Start, Run and type in regedit then click) Find “UpperFilters” and “LowerFilters” (and “UpperFilters.bak” “LowerFilters.bak”, if they exist) value under the following key in the registry, and delete it:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlClass{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}Quit Registry Editor. Reboot.NOTE: You might need to reinstall any CD recording apps you have, if they start to not work completely, after doing this.