Hi,

Installed Vista Ultimate a few weeks ago.

Only had problems with Windows Mail so far. All drives and devices have been working up to now. Windows mail problem has been solved using Thunderbird.

This evening however Vista has decided to not recognise the CDRW and DVDRW drives I have in my Dell Dimension D4700, P4 2.8 3GB RAM 1 SATA drives, Optical drives are IDE

Both drives are however shown in Device Manager with an error message. The error message is brief and gives no solutions when I check on line

Windows cannot start this hardware device because its configuration information (in the registry) is incomplete or damaged. (Code 19)

Click 'Check for solutions' to send data about this device to Microsoft and to see if there is a solution available.

Vista RC1 worked fine and I have no other devices connected to the machine except for wireless USB Dongle.

Seriously looking at going back to XP Pro.

I'm certain I've read of issues with Vista and loosing optical drives but didn't find anything on a google search

Ceri

Have you tried removing the devices from device manager and letting Windows reconfigure them yet?

Also, did you attempt to install any (possibly incompatible) CD writing software? That can hose things by adding incompatible filter driver settings.

Grogan

Grogan,

Thanks for th ereply.

My apologies

I should have posted that I have already removed both drives in Device Manager and restarted.

Neither drive is picked up normally in My Computer or Windows Explorer, but once again both are seen in Device Manager with theerror posted.

This of course should eliminate the ribbon cable, single IDE port and the IDE controller on the motherboard.

Reverting to XP Pro is looking a good idea at present.

I've not installed any CD or DVD writing software since I installed Vista.

Ceri

Surprised you have had a problem with the new Windows Mail. Its been trouble free for me, and a big improvement over Outlook Express.

I have to go back to XP every day when I go to work, and I find XP increasingly unsatisfactory in comparison to Vista.

Shelly

Here's the info anyways... it may still be applicable.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=320553

Check for upperfilters and lowerfilters registry values and delete if present.

Grogan

Hi,

A True Image rebuild solved things briefly.

Don't you just love software with this sort of bug.

Now tried the registry edit route

Saved the notepad file to desktop as CDFIX.REG and then merged it with registry by double clcking on it.


I now have both optical drives back, they are still there after a after a cold reboot.

Many thanks for your help on this

Ceri