DVD/CD Drive "vanished"

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John Guest

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Oct 14, 2017
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I have an ACER Aspire E15 laptop computer running Windows 10. The DVD/CD reader/writer has stopped working. It does not show as a drive on"This PC - Drives and devices", nor does it show on the control panel.
Is there any way of "getting it back"?
 
vanishing CD/DVD drives were not unheard of in Windows XP and 7, not too sure about Win10.

Try the SFC /scannow command first from a command prompt.

If that doesn't work,
  • go into regedit
  • go to this key: HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\
  • Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}
  • and delete the entries for UpperLimits and LowerLimits
  • exit
  • reboot
Restart the PC and see if the CD drive is available.
 
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It could be a hardware failure. If the computer doesn't see the drive at all, then perhaps the connection between the mothorboard and the optical drive is bad.

If you don't want to open up the laptop, then the easiest work around is to buy an external optical drive.

My two Acer Aspire netbooks (722 and V5) came with no optical drives. I bought a portable DVD burner which works well. (Make sure it has a Y-connector that uses 2 USB ports because a single USB connection can't supply enough power).

I'm glad I have the portable drive because we had a very old computer that only came with a CD-ROM drive. I was able to use this portable drive on it also. And I have an eeepc netbook running linux. It is a 7" netbook without an optical drive and the portable works on it as well.
 
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