I came back from vacation, opened my laptop, and clicked on my computer. Only the "c" drive showed up. There was no icon for my CD/DVD drive. Put a CD in and nothing happened. Went to device manager and it said This device cannot start (code 10). I called Toshiba since my note is new and he had me go thru the regisrty editor and delete an upper filter, whatever that is. I restarted and everything was fine. It worked.
Next day, no CD/DVD icon in my computer. Any ideas?

Does your laptop include one of those horrendous manufacturer-created "recovery partitions"? Because manufacturers are so cheap, nowadays, many of them don't include any physical media with the PC. Rather, they create a proprietary image of what used to be an actual "recovery CD/DVD" and save it to an "invisible" partition, usually situated immediately before what Windows marks the C: drive.

I'm not sure that it's relevant; I'm just curious. I have had problems with drives/letter assignments due to these manufacturer-supplied recovery partitions.

Toshiba's come with an image based recovery DVD - it simply reimages your hard drive when you boot from it. It's handly and quick, but the options that a normal recovery CD has are absent.

It seems that this most likely occurred because you rebooted your computer. I'd guess that, if you don't reboot then your CD/DVD would continue to be recognized. If these assumptions are correct, then I'd suspect that something was loading when you reboot and is rewriting the upper and lower filter values.

As such, I'd suggest you use this free program ( http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysintern...s/Autoruns.mspx ) to see what's loading at startup that may be affecting your CD/DVD burner. Disable (don't delete) the suspected items, reboot, delete the upper filter per the instructions you got, then reboot and see if the setting holds (see if you can see your drive). If it works, then one of the things that you disabled is what's causing the problem.

You can repeat this process on each individual item (one-by-one) to isolate the exact culprit. Once we know that we may be able to offer suggestions on how to repair it (most likely removing the program and installing the latest, Vista compatible version).

When you changed the registry entry, did you save the changes?

I agree with usasma in this one. Known issue since XP, Upper and Lower Filters seems like the issue here. I'm sure that will fix the issue

MicroSoft Support


I recommend to right click in My Computer in the Registry Editor and choose "Export" to make a backup before doing anything though.



Mav

Deleting the upper filter in the registry works. For how long I don't know. But it is an easy fix if it happens again. Toshiba seems to think that a third party program was the culprit. By the way, how do you save the registry settings. I didn't see that choice?

I would agree that a 3rd part program is probably resetting the registry entry - and I'd remove all CD/DVD type software (one-at-a-time) to see which is the culprit.