CDrom drives: Gone.

[TheDragon 0]

I'm having some serious problems.

Ever since a few days ago, my CDrom drives have become unrecognized in windows. Apparently their drivers cannot start because they are corrupted. I have two CDrom drives, a philips CDRW804 drive and a samsung 8x DVD drive. I've had them working in XP for a few months, in beta and in final, and have never had problems with either.

 

I've traced the problem down to a corrupted, generic windows IMAPI driver, called IMAPI.sys. I'm not sure what IMAPI is or does, or how its associated with my CDroms. I found this by removing the cd rom drives from the hardware manager (they were not working, had yellow exclamation points next to them) and did an auto detect hardware check to reinstall them as the help files say, etc. Windows picks up both drives fine, as it always has, but upon installing it installs driver for what I guess is the new basic windows XP cdrom layer, which is listed as "%imapi_settings10_devdesc%". Whenever I try and add either CDrom, it starts installing drivers for the above. The installation of the above fails, because it asks for an imapi.sys file from the windows XP installation CDrom, which I cannot use because neither of my CDroms work. The imapi.sys file is also located in c:\windows\system32\drivers, but when I select that as the file it needs the installation of the imapi_settings10_devdesc device fails, and in turn the installation of the cdrom fails. After that failure, the CDrom is listed in hardware devices but it has an exclamation by it again, listed with the same error as before: "Windows cannot load the device driver for this hardware. The driver may be corrupted or missing. (Code 39)"

 

It's like it cannot start the drivers for the CDroms, which it has, without the imapi driver, which seems to be corrupted. I've seen a few people with this problem, who ascribe it to Adaptec ezcdcreator and recommend removing certain registry keys, which did not work for me. I've had these CDroms running fine with Adaptec installed in XP before (adaptec did not work at the time) but these CDroms stopped working before I went to windows upgrade and got the new easy cd creator 5 update, so I don't think that did anything.

 

Neither of my CDroms have specific windows drivers, because they are nativley supported and have been for quite awhile. If they have drivers on their install discs (I don't think I have a CD for either) then thats worthless as well because I cannot access the cdroms in windows, and I really hope its not neccessary to boot into dos with a boot disk and copy a driver to my hard drive. I would prefer to download them but neither manufacturer offers a specific windows driver for their CDroms. Also, both drives work in the bios etc., and they power on fine - windows recognizes them, but cannot start their drivers so they're unusable. They don't appear as drives in 'my computer'.

 

If anyone has seen this before, please fill me in on a solution - I think its a newer problem, windows XP native, so thats why it may be elusive; I've searched for solutions far and wide and have found nothing specific, so if someone can offer some advice I'd be glad to take it.

Thanks.

-Phil Crosby

[TheDragon 0]

Ok, I've completley solved my problem in a rather obscure way:

 

Let this be a reference to anyone who has the same problem.

 

Anyway, theres a registry key that has some bearing on how windows looks at or uses your CDrom drive, installed by windows' IMAPI or perhaps by something from adaptec. Either way, the two keys I'm speaking of are not needed and were what was hindering my cdroms from being detected.

 

Many people suggested this next step, so I took it. I first went into the registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}

At the above key there were upper and lower filter keys. I deleted those, and rebooted, and as suggest by a few forums, it worked. My CDroms were detected and fully operational; no problems. BUT, windows was still asking me to setup the device I mentioned in my previous post, the "%imapi_settings10_devdesc%" device. Well I let it autofind drivers for the device, and this time when it asked for the XP CD, I had a functional CDrom drive and put it in, and the wizard read the file it needed off of the CD and actually installed fully.

 

So now the mysterious "%imapi_settings10_devdesc%" device and the cdrom detection problem are solved, in one foul swoop =)

 

Hope this helps anyone out there with a similar problem, it sure would have helped me! The registry key thing is a bit odd, but it was put there by some CDrom program(s) and can mess up your windows detection (only if you're having problems that is).

[Realtino 0]

Quote:

Ok, I've completley solved my problem in a rather obscure way:

Let this be a reference to anyone who has the same problem.

Anyway, theres a registry key that has some bearing on how windows looks at or uses your CDrom drive, installed by windows' IMAPI or perhaps by something from adaptec. Either way, the two keys I'm speaking of are not needed and were what was hindering my cdroms from being detected.

Many people suggested this next step, so I took it. I first went into the registry:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}
At the above key there were upper and lower filter keys. I deleted those, and rebooted, and as suggest by a few forums, it worked. My CDroms were detected and fully operational; no problems. BUT, windows was still asking me to setup the device I mentioned in my previous post, the "%imapi_settings10_devdesc%" device. Well I let it autofind drivers for the device, and this time when it asked for the XP CD, I had a functional CDrom drive and put it in, and the wizard read the file it needed off of the CD and actually installed fully.

So now the mysterious "%imapi_settings10_devdesc%" device and the cdrom detection problem are solved, in one foul swoop =)

Hope this helps anyone out there with a similar problem, it sure would have helped me! The registry key thing is a bit odd, but it was put there by some CDrom program(s) and can mess up your windows detection (only if you're having problems that is).

Yes Phil, same happened to me, thanks for the solution.
the reason for the problem, i think it is caused by the instalation of virtual cdrom like Daemon & Nero & CdrOnwin and post instalation of any cdr burner software.
Yes nero also install a virtual drive.

Now how do i get rid off that Nero virtual (icon) in control panel?
and also in regedit there is a couple of keys that refer to that nero virtual but i refused to delete, does NOT allow me to do it.

please helpe on this.

Thanks

NOTE: i mean Nero Image Drive
realtino@hotmail.com