Am I the only one?
10.30am
Ok, I am, apparently, the only one. Out of the entire world’s population who are running Vista right this minute, I am the ONLY person on the entire planet who has had his DVD drive disappear. What’s really annoying is that I can see it in Device Manager. Vista even has the make and model number right... and Vista is telling me that the drivers are corrupt or missing...
Ok, just so I’ve got this right, Vista: You had the drive to start with, then somehow you managed to lose or sod up the drivers that you installed for it and now you’re telling me that you can’t find any drivers to replace the drivers that don’t work. Actually, no, that’s not quite true. What you’re saying is that hitting the Driver Update is no bloody good because all it does is check how new the drivers are and you’ve told me three times that the drivers I’m using, that’ll be those useless corrupt or missing ones, are the most up-to-date versions. How can you tell??? They’re corrupt or missing! How the bloody hell do you know that what’s either broken or not there is better than anything else???
That’s like me saying that the burnt out BMW 5 series up the road is the better car to own given the choice between that or a pristine Corsa 1.0L straight from the showroom!
Give me my bloody DVD drive back!!!
12pm
Ok, so after immense amounts of Googling, I think I’ve found a solution. It’s a registry hack for XP but right now I’m happy to try anything. Seriously, I’m beginning to think that self-harm is a pink and fuzzy land of love compared to staring at the damn Device Manager and its lack of a DVD drive... or driver... whatever.
But before I do the hack I have to overcome one small problem... well, two.
In desperation I decided to uninstall the DVD drive from Device Manager and now, no matter how many reboots or scans for new hardware I do, I can’t get it to appear again, broken or otherwise. Scanning for hardware has brought to my attention the fact that I still haven’t installed my webcam, but seeing as I’m not planning on having a Leslie Grantham moment anytime soon, I’m not too bothered.
What does bother me is that despite installing iTunes my iPod keeps popping up as a Mass Storage Device and my PDA (which Vista has renamed as a Smartphone) still has an out of date media player. Normally I wouldn’t be all that bothered except Vista has taken to reminding me of this every time it gets a bit bored... and none of it is helping me get my DVD drive back.
So that’s problem one. Vista can’t even see the defunct drive... so I could be on a hiding to nothing.
Problem two is the utter lack of a ‘Run’ box on the start menu. Why’s that gone? Ok, so perhaps this is to make Vista a more mouse driven experience but with that upside-down program tree, it’s a bit of a pain... especially as I don’t even know if Vista has a Registry Editor... so now I’m dreading doing a search, even though I’ve figured out how to stop the search trawling through my emails too.
But what’s this, typing in regedit brings up one hit, the Registry Editor! Yay is me and all that stuff.... time to hack and see if I can get my DVD drive back...
