Oh, God, my CD-Rom drive has vanished. How do I get it back?

I was messing around with TuneUp Utilities 2007 today to check out the registry cleaner and all that stuff. I ran a bunch of its functions - the reg cleaner, reg defragment, junk files cleanup, and so on - and everything went fine (in fact, I noticed an appreciable improvement in my computer’s general performance) until I tried to run a CD later on. I realized that my CD-Rom drive is completely absent from “My Computer” and that the CD won’t autorun. Poop!

So I did a system restore (i had intentionally set a restore point before running the Tuneup thing) and the drive’s still missing. Yikes.

So I’ve tried to update the driver manually (“Windows did not update the driver because it is not newer than the one you’re already using”), tried to uninstall the CD-Rom from where it appears under System Devices (but windows automatically re-installs it upon a restart, using the same “corrupted or missing” driver), and so on.

The drive doesn’t appear under “My Computer,” but it DOES appear Device Manager, albeit with a yellow exclamation mark over it - “Windows cannot load the device driver for this hardware. The driver may be corrupted or missing. (Code 39.”

What’s going on? How do I get my CDrom back?

If Device Manager lists the maker of the drive, you may be able to go to their site and download a new driver for it.

You can also try this.

There’s always the brute force approach. Uninstall the drive in Device Manager. Shut down the computer, open it up and unplug the drive from the ribbon cable. Turn the computer back on and let it boot up without the drive. Then shut it down again, plug the drive back into the ribbon cable and boot back up and see if Windows finds it as new hardware and installs it.

Yeah, that’s the first thing that I did; downloaded the driver, copied it to System32/drivers and said yes to “overwrite?” Same story.

I finally fixed it; I waited until the error number came up again and googled it. “Error 39” - I guess it’s pretty common, but it requires a registry edit to fix. Weirdo!