David Machiavello’s posterous

I found this as kind of odd, so I figured I would post my story about this little adventure. I have a Dell Studio 15 (1535) with Windows Vista SP1. It came with a Blu Ray drive combo that has been working flawlessly until about a few days ago (or maybe longer since i haven't used it in a few weeks) when I noticed that the drive letter to my optical drive was missing. I decided to check in Vista's Device Manager to make sure that the drive was at least still there.

Fortunately, the drive was in fact listed (Optiarc DVDRWBD BC-5600S), but showed that there was an error. I couldn't reinstall the driver for it because there aren't any drivers for optical drives and I couldn't update the firmware from Dell's site because Windows wasn't assigning the optical drive a drive letter. I tried to use Vista's "Check for Solutions" and found that it was completely useless. It didn't even tell me that there was no solution found, it just disappeared on me, perhaps trying to pretend I didn't ask Windows for help.


Well, after doing some searching online, I came across this post which reminded me of the registry hack to remove the Upper and lower filters. Now I've done this several times before on different machines in XP (back in my Geek Squad days) and never had any long term ill effect, but I'm always cautious when I do things like edit the registry to fix hardware devices. I would always recommend to back up your registry (if at least the keys that you're about to delete) first.

These are the steps I took to resolve my problem in Vista:

1. Open up regedit (as administrator)
2. Browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11­CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}
3. Backup/Export the Key (this step is optional but HIGHLY recommended)
4. Delete the UpperFilters and LowerFilters strings (confirming each time)
5. Restart the machine.

For me this worked like a charm. My drive shows up and reads discs with no problems.