Optical Drive's not working

My computer at work (HP DC7100 running W2K Pro SP4) has just today decided that my cd-rom drives (the IDE cd-rom and USB dvd/cd-rw) should no longer work. When in device manager, it tells me for both, "code 31 - The device is not working properly because Windows cannot load the drivers required for this device"

Both drives are detected in BIOS, But neither show up for any program (media player, roxio easy cd creator, etc...) and don't show within "my computer" (just my c: drive and the other 5 network drives I'm mapped to).

Well, I've un-installed both, and then ran add/remove hardware. That auto detects both of the drives, then installs the drivers. After all is said and done, It still shows "code 31". Then I proceeded to rename all of the drivers in the system32 folder that the drives use to cdrom.sys.old ... etc....

Another add/remove, and I'm still stuck with "code 31".

Any ideas as to why W2K Pro would just stop recognizing either drive?

find the values "upperfilter" and "lowerfilter" in the registry and delete them. They should be associated with your optical drives in the registry as well. You may find LowerFilter in several locations, do not delete it unless the value Upperfilter is also present in the same key.

The following should help:

thanks. i'll look into that when I get back to work on monday.

It worked. Thanks guys