Windows 10: Optical Drive Disappears from File Explorer

After much procrastination on upgrading a perfectly good Windows 7 operating system, I took the leap and successfully upgrading to Windows 10 over Two months ago. After completing the upgrade, I though wow what a great product. All of the installed drives, devices etc. were listed and worked just as before. About 2 weeks ago, I noticed that my Blu-ray drive was no longer listed in File Explorer. I checked Device Manager and it was listed and showed to be working properly. I found similar but not identical issues several forms related to a device disappearing so I tried some of the suggestions all of which did not cause the optical drive to appear as before. Since the drive is less than 3 months old, I contacted manufacturer support and was told that this is a know problem when upgrading to Windows 10 vs. a new install and was advised to contact Microsoft support. The manufacture technician provided some suggestions and was advised that I should not attempt on my own and let Microsoft Support make the suggested changes.

OK, time to weed through the Microsoft maze to find a method to report what I consider a bug, considering that I did not have any issue with Windows 7. First chat session, a Microsoft support person connected to my computer remotely and performed the same procedures that I had already done so I put up with 1-1/2 of them digging though my computer in the hopes that issue could be identified. The command reg.exe add "HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\atapi\Controller0" /f /v EnumDevice1 /t REG_DWORD /d 0x0000001 was executed as recommended by drive manufacturer and rebooted. The drive showed up in File Explorer and assumed this was the fix. This lasted approximately one week and then the optical drive again disappeared from File Explorer but shows in Device Manager and working properly.

Contacted Microsoft support chat again, when though the complete story and after 2 hours of remote connection to my computer the following Registry entries were added (as recommended by Drive Manufacturer) followed by a re-start:
reg.exe add "HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\atapi\Controller0" /f /v EnumDevice1 /t REG_DWORD /d 0x00000001
reg.exe add "HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\atapi\Controller0" /f /v EnumDevice2 /t REG_DWORD /d 0x00000001
reg.exe add "HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\atapi\Controller0" /f /v EnumDevice3 /t REG_DWORD /d 0x00000001
reg.exe add "HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\atapi\Controller0" /f /v EnumDevice4 /t REG_DWORD /d 0x00000001

End result, no change, the optical drive was not listed in File Explorer. The last comment from technical support before re-st was if this does not work the optical drive is not compatible with Windows 10*Eek Interesting how a device works properly for 6 weeks and now is not compatible with Windows 10.

I performed some not technical troubleshooting like manually ejecting the drive tray and inserting a disk. After the disk read completes, now the drive is listed under File Explorer and played without any problem. After ejecting the disk, the drive disappears again from File Explorer.

In summary, my opinion is that Microsoft released Windows 10 before thoroughly testing the operating system and relies on customer complaints to fix what should have been identified during the Beta testing. This evident by the "complimentary" support as it termed in the message sent at the end of the chat session. Perhaps someone from Microsoft with more than basic troubleshooting knowledge will read this post and consider addressing this problem.

:)

 

CD-ROM Running

I would not enable autoplay. Just open File Explorer, slide down in the pane on the left until you see the optical drive, then select it. This should open the optical drive in File Explorer. Double click Autoplay.exe, if it exists, it run the installation
program,

 

how do i burn pictures to a cd

Open File Explorer and select your pictures, right click and select Send to and select your optical drive. I believe it will prepare the files and then you can select the optical drive and select to burn files to disc.

 

That action about the ODD disappearing when a disc is removed happens in my Win10 Pro when I have Hide empty drives checked in Folder Options, View tab. It also happened in Win7 and Win8.1.

 

Well that was a new item to try unfortunately, unchecking the file explorer View option "Hide empty drives" did not resolve the problem. Thanks for the information.