[bobsobol]

Hi,
I have a problem with my CD/DVD drive in my new Vista PC that I can't really explain... and I can explain most things. I usually work from Virtual disc images on our LAN, so I can't even say for sure when this first occurred or what I might have done to cause it. Which is always a good starting point. The problem doesn't make any sense to me. Here are the symptoms:-

• When I insert a disc, and try to open the D: drive in Explorer, or play a DVD in MediaPlayer, I'm told to insert a disc in drive D:, sometimes the tray spits out with the disc still on it.
• If I try to play it in MediaCenter it tells me the disc is a blank and asks me what I want to burn to it.
• If I try to play the disc with VLC player... no problem.
• If I try to browse the disc to play the files on it in VLC player... there's no disc in the drive.
• If I GNU dd from the disc to an image from the command line, there's no problem.
• If I try to make an image from Nero, there's no disc in the drive.
• If I try to read the disc by attaching it to a XP Virtual machine, it's fine.
• If I mount discs in Daemon Tools they read fine.

So, from all this, I gather... The drive physically works okay, recognizes the disc and draw status, but the filesystem is not recognized by the OS... like it was a Mac HFS disc or something else that's not ISO 9660 or UDF.

But the filesystems and filesystem recognizers must also be working, because they can read the image files. The only way I can read a disc in my host Vista machine without firing up a VM is to go to the command line and dd it to an iso that I mount in daemon tools. That's just not right.

Added to this confusion I can use all the burning \ writing features of the player fine. But I can't actually read files from the disc I burned on my machine without imaging it to my hard drive first of course.

I just don't get it... what's wrong with it and what could I possibly do to stop it being so weird. Any help or advise much appreciated.

[Elvandil]

Sounds like a possible driver conflict due to installed CD-ROM drivers. What programs load drivers for it (like UltraIso, PowerIso, Alcohol, Burning Programs, DVDInfo Pro, etc.)? If you have Alcohol, is the book type set to DVD-ROM? If so, this affects all other programs that access that drive (except VM's which bypass your OS drivers).

[bobsobol]

Hmm... well, I try to run most stuff in VMs to reduce impact on my main system. This is how I know my Virtual Machines can read and write discs on the drive, but the host can only write, or read as raw, not recognize the file system and browse it.

I'm not sure what might load drivers to that device and not to Daemon Tools virtual SCSI devices, or why that should allow raw device access only.

Nero Burning ROM 7 has been on the system since I got it, (Updated it to Ultra, but some time before this started happening) and there is a program which handles the Remote Control which comes with it's own equivalent of Media Center... which I never use because it isn't as good as media center, but I can't install the Remote Control driver without it. (why do people do that, it's so annoying.) Again, that has been there since the system was first set up, it's part of the initial OEM setup.

From the rest of the list, I don't think I have anything like that. I do have WinISO and ISORecorder3 installed to manipulate ISO images and make ISOs graphically from files and folders.

I have CloneCD, CloneDVD and AnyDVD in a VM all of their own, and they work fine from there.

I can't think why I would want Alcohol as well as Daemon Tools, and I prefer Daemon. Even so, it creates a virtual SCSI bus, it doesn't affect the existing bus or file systems. Maybe some versions of Alcohol allow creating disc images, but that's outside the remit of Daemon... (which would partly explain why I prefer it, there is such a thing as too much functionality.)

The thing which really gets me is that I can recognize ISO9660 from a virtual disc, but not a real one. And I can access raw blocks from a real disc, and write to a real disc... but not browse one.

It's like the FileSystem Recognizer has become disconnected from that device, and that device only. So it doesn't even bother to see if it can read a filesystem from any disc I insert.

Other than some hellish registry corruption, I can't think what could do that.

8X-------------------------------------------------------------------
Edit:

I found the solution. I thought back to what I would have done in the NT4/9x days. Found the Device Manager under Manage My Computer and uninstalled the physical device.

After a reboot and relog Vista found a new device (the DVD Writer I just uninstalled) set it up, and now it works as expected again.

I'm still none the wiser as to what caused this in the first place, but I presume something (quite possibly some CD copy protection that isn't Vista compatible, even though the program still works) has made a mess of the HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet, which I hope we all know not to mess about with manually. It houses (among other things, and in quite an illegible way) the layout of the Windows System Object Namespace, as viewable with Mark Rasanovichs' fantastic WinObj.

This associates filesystems and filesystem recognizers with devices named pipes, streams, junctions, aliases (substitutions) and reparse points.

It's a lot like /dev and mountlist (/etc/fstab) on unix systems rolled up into something much more object oriented. This is more manageable programatically, but less transparent for power users. (not that automount is exactly transparent)

Anyway, uninstalling the device and filesystem associations, must have removed any and all of those links. Letting it rediscover and install the device again set them back up as they should have been in the first place without me having to get my hands too dirty.

If I ever see anyone with something similar, I will recommend this course of action immediately.

[Elvandil]

Thank you for your followup. It did make sense that the problem had to be in the host registry since the VM's isolation is almost complete and no drivers or programs inside them would be expected to affect the host.

You can mark your own threads "solved" using the button above.

[bobsobol]

Indeed... but problems on the host usually follow through to the guest more than that. The fact that the VMs worked, and VLC and *nix dd commands worked, indicated that the problem was the Filesystem Driver, not the Device Driver.

And thanks for pointing me to the "Resolved" button... yes, I'm still a n00b here.