Saturday, January 24, 2009 4:39 PM
I noticed something odd last week…I tried to install something on my older HP laptop that had Vista running on it. No biggie, except that the optical drive wasn’t showing up as an option. I ignored it and moved on to a different route (made a VM instead of installing directly on the metal…details not necessary for this post).
Anyway, point is that the optical drive wasn’t showing up.
Today I went to put Win7 on my laptop. I use Daemon tools to mount ISO’s, and I attached my Win7 iso without a problem. However, when I went to MyComputer, NONE of my optical drives showed up – real or virtual!
I did some digging online until I found this article. Turns out that some programs alter registry settings that impact whether Vista can see the optical drives or not. At first you may see an error in Device Manager telling you that the driver may be corrupt, but this isn’t the case (and its really just a horrible default message).
Because it’s been in this state for who knows how long, I don’t know which program (or hotfix for that matter) caused this. But at least I can get Win 7 installed on it now.
D