I’ve been installing and playing with Windows 8 lately, including setting it up to be my main daily use computer. Everything has gone fairly smooth except for my DVD drives. The drives did not show up after a clean install; they weren’t in Windows Explorer, they weren’t in Disk Management, they weren’t in Device Manager. Not even showing up as an Unknown Device without any drivers. They were just nowhere.

I finally found the solution, in a registry entry. I don’t know if this is a bug in Windows, or just a glitch in my installation. But I put this entry into the registry, and my DVD drives started working immediately. I think I had to rescan Device Manager, but I didn’t have to reboot.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\atapi\Controller0]
“EnumDevice1″=dword:00000002

I set the value to 2 because I have 2 drives. If you only have one drive you can just enter 1.

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Posted in Windows 8 by Scott Schrantz No Comments Yet