Yesterday was at my customer’s place and the manager reported to me that his laptop’s DVD drive cannot be used. At first I thought that it is the same old complaint on some CD or DVD cannot be read but I was wrong. Once Windows XP has been fully loaded, I opened My Computer and the DVD drive is not there! First thing to check when a CD/DVD drive is not working is to try to eject the drive to see if there’s power. Yeah the drive ejected without problems. Then next step is to check the Device Manager to see if Windows is able to detect the drive in the first place or whether it had any problems with the driver.
True enough, there’s a yellow exclamation mark for the DVD/CD-ROM drives category telling me that there’s something wrong with it. I double click on the drive at device manager and I saw this error message that says “Windows cannot load the device driver for this hardware. The driver may be corrupted or missing. (Code 39). Click Troubleshoot to start the troubleshooter for this device.”
Microsoft advises to update the driver by going to the Driver tab, and then click Update Driver to start the Hardware Update Wizard. Follow the instructions to update the driver. I did that but doesn’t fix the problem. I’ve even tried to uninstall the drive and then active the “Scan for hardware changes” to install the drive again.
Finally I remembered a similar problem which I’ve experienced when I got my new Acer laptop which is the DVD drive missing from My Computer after uninstalling NTI Media Maker 8 and then installing Nero 9. It is actually the same problem which is DVD drive missing from My Computer except previously the device manager didn’t show any errors but now I got error code 39.
I tried my luck on removing the the UpperFilters and LowerFilters from registry, rebooted the laptop and voila! the DVD drive appears in My Computer!
Here are the steps to remove the UpperFilters and LowerFilters to fix the code 39 error in device manager:
1. Go to run (or hit Win+R), type Regedit and click OK.
2. Expand My Computer in Registry Editor, and then expand HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE.
2. Expand SYSTEM, and then expand CurrentControlSet.
3. Expand Control, and then expand Class.
4. Under Class, click {4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}.
5. In the details pane of Registry Editor, on the right side, delete UpperFilters and also LowerFilters.
From the previous case of missing dvd drive and also the unable to install scanner problem, I’ve started to understand that whenever you’ve previously installed and uninstalled any software/driver which later causes an error in Device Manager, you should first try to remove the UpperFilters and LowerFilters. Of course, always backup the original registry key that you’re going to delete using “Export”.