A DVD or Digital Versatile Disc is an optical storage medium. It offers more storage capacity than the compact discs even though it is similar in size. Windows 8 users now face a problem where the presence of optical drives does not register with the Operating system. This happens whether the user gets the OS installed directly, or they upgrade to it from a previous version like Windows 7. This results in the drive not appearing in either the Windows Explorer or the Device Manager.
The cause for this Windows 8 issue is still being investigated; meanwhile users can try out these alternate methods to make the DVD drive work on their system. Remember, if the device you have the OS loaded on is new, to check the optical drive cables before you begin with the procedure.
Method 1
First, open the command prompt from the Start menu. This is done by going to the start screen and typing in CMD. Now press the key combination Ctrl+shift+Enter simultaneously. This causes an elevated prompt to appear, and you might have to click OK to confirm access past the User Account Control.
- In the prompt that has appeared, paste the following command and then hit the Enter button.
reg.exe add “HKLMSystemCurrentControlSetServicesatapiController0″ /f /v EnumDevice1 /t REG_DWORD /d 0×00000001
- After you have pasted the above command into the prompt, reboot the system and you will find the DVD drive visible in the computer and the Device Manager.
If you find that the above method is not sufficient to deal with this Windows 8 issue, then try the next method.
Method 2
This method uses a free utility that can be downloaded and installed on the system. This software is called the CD-DVD Icon Repair.
This tool is really handy and very easy to use. It was primarily designed to run on Windows 7, but is shown to work just fine on the Windows 8 OS as well. Run the program and click the Repair CD-DVD button. Restart the computer and the DVD drives will now be visible in the Windows Explorer as well as in the Device Manager.
These are the methods used to deal with the problem of undetected DVD drives on a Windows 8-run computer system.
