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Now I know what you’re probably thinking, you use Vista? Yes I am part of the few percentiles that took the plunge into the terrible world of Microsoft’s new operating system, Windows Vista. Now that being said, I wanted to bring a problem I’ve been facing to the table, an issue with Vista that has angered me for about two months now.

It was a hot summer morning when I decided I needed to install software to emulate a CD drive on my new Windows Vista system. As always I installed Daemon ware, a great tool that I have always used to emulate my games that were backed up in ISO format. The installation process went perfectly and after a restart daemon ware was up and running. My games worked fine and I was happy. Later that day I was on my way out to visit a friend up in Maine, so I decided to burn a CD with iTunes for the long ride.

I created a play list within iTunes, placed a CD-R in my DVD writer, and pushed the burn button. To my surprise I could not burn my mix. Instead of writing my CD, it came up with an error message “no burning software or burner”. Now I was stuck, I had no time to fix this issue so I ended up driving 3 hours with some old CDs that ended up being appeasing enough to not ruin my ride up to Maine. When I came home from my trip and went back to my PC to see if the issue still existed. Still once again it said “no burning software or burner”. I had no clue what caused the problem as I had done a bunch of things the day it broke so I started searching Google and found a fix and that was it. Once again I could burn CDs and I didn’t get the “no burning software or burner” error message. Not even the error message “no recorders found on the system”. ITunes finally just worked and I was able to burn my CD.

That being said remember the title Windows Vista and the Two Daemon Dwarves, there is a second dwarf that I found within Windows Vista. Now a few days ago I downloaded a program that was formatted as Universal Image Format with a torrent I downloaded. The file was a formatted using MagicISO and I had to be able to use the file. So I decided to install MagicISO on to my new Windows Vista system. I installed MagicISO, burnt the .UIF file to a disk perfectly, and then had to restart my computer for a few patches on Microsoft Patch Tuesday. When I restarted, to my delight, all of my DVD drives had completely disappeared. After a few seconds I realized this had to be related to the fact that I had install MagicISO earlier in the day. So I thought that I could fix the problem by simply uninstalling MagicISO, but I was wrong, I uninstalled MagicISO and my CD-ROM was still none existent. My CD-ROM drive seemed to have disappeared forever. I decided then that I should start Googling for a fix to get my DVD drive back. After some searching I was able to find a post on a forum to fix the issue. It was as easy as:

How to fix a missing DVD Drive:

1. Open up regedit and find {4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}
2. In the right pane delete both the UpperFilters and LowerFilters
3. Restart, your drives should be back

Warning: Please use this fix at your own risk; Zeidz.com takes no responsibility for broken registries. I found that this did break all CD writing software and it was necessary to reinstall/repair iTunes and Roxio Easy CD Creator.

The fact that I had to delete the Upper and Lower filters from the registry truly enraged me, there was no reason for this. Why is it that either Microsoft or the CD emulation software companies couldn’t make this work when I first installed. Or at least warn me that this is a persistent issue, or at least they’d heed a little warning so I don’t mess up my computer when I need it working. Either way fixes at least exist or I’m sure that at this point new releases will fix this dilemma. I hope that my blog post will at least help those who are having the problems, or provide some fair warning to anyone who is using Windows Vista to please be careful when installing CD Emulation software.