Help! I'm having a wierd problem. Today I was trying to reinstall my sound card due to sound problems. I went into the device manager and disabled the card, then removed it. Then upon rebooting, both my CD-RW and DVD-RW drives disappeared from Windows! The BIOS still recognizes them, and the device manager has them listed with yellow exclamation marks, saying that the drivers are either corrupt or missing. I can't even find drivers for these, only firmware upgrades, which also won't work due to the fact that I have no drives! I need my drives back, help!!!

unistall them from device manager and restart and let them automatically be instaleld by windows Please keep us updated so we know if we helped you or not.

Already tried that. Restarted and Device Manager still shows them there, exclamation marks and all. I don't know what to do.

whats the make and model?...... Please keep us updated so we know if we helped you or not.

Custom PC actually... But I have good news! I fixed it! (For how long, I don't know). I did some major sleuthing around and found (on these very forums no less) someone with a similar problem. Someone replied to that post with a fix, that went like this: Locate and delete the UpperFilters and or LowerFilters value in in the registry: 0. Start Registry Editor (Regedt32.exe). 1. Navigate to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318} 2. Delete UPPERFILTERS and LOWERFILTERS. 3. Exit Regedt32. 4. Shutdown and restart. All I could find in there were UPPERFILTERS, but I deleted that and found my drives again! I remember this happening a while back and I did the same thing to fix it. I just want to pass on that if anyone else has this problem, try that registry fix I just posted. Works great! Now to really fix my computer, I just need to reformat the cursed thing...or incinerate it :p

Thank you, schism. Same thing happened to me, and your post cleared up the stubborn yellow exclamation point on my DVD/CD-RW that, like a clingy ex, would not go away. Even after uninstalling both drives and all IDE controllers in Safe Mode & rebooting back into Safe Mode, there they were again: Yellow exclamation point aggravations. I suspect that my Pinnacle Studio 9, Adobe Premiere 6, and Nero 6 Ultra all had something to do with a battle of the proprietary drivers. Regardless, thanks again for your post & for helping me keep what's left of my hair.