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Steve-JohnsonFlag for United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

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How can I make Windows 8.1 reliably recognise my DVD drive?

I'm running a fresh installation of Windows 8.1 on my desktop PC. Everything is working fine except for the DVD drive, which Windows does not recognise. I know that the drive is powered because I can insert and remove discs and the drive spins up. However, the drive does not appear at all in Explorer and there are no entries for disc drives in the Device Manager.

I've read online that this seems to be quite a common problem - Microsoft themselves list a few possible solutions which mostly involve editing the registry (http://support2.microsoft.com/kb/314060). I have attempted all of the solutions in the article, with the exception of reinstalling the driver (which I cannot do, as there is no relevant entry in Device Manager).

On one occasion I was able to make the drive appear, and used VLC to successfully play a DVD. However, the next time the machine was booted the problem recurred exactly as before.

Can anyone shed any light on this?
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cwstad2
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Hi can you please try this

Run Command Prompt as an  Administrator.

Type following and press enter

reg.exe add "HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\atapi\Controller0" /f /v EnumDevice1 /t REG_DWORD /d 0x00000001

Reboot the system
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McKnife
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99 times out of 100 it is because of software creating incorrect upper/lower filter settings.
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ASKER

Machine doesn't attempt to boot from bootable CD.

Next steps:
Try the drive in another machine.
Swap cables.
Try another SATA socket..
I've requested that this question be closed as follows:

Accepted answer: 250 points for McKnife's comment #a40350171
Assisted answer: 250 points for nobus's comment #a40351578
Assisted answer: 0 points for Steve-Johnson's comment #a40498272

for the following reason:

To fix a problem ask 3 questions:
Has it ever worked?
When did it last work?
What has changed?

Solution was to plug cable into alternative mother board socket.  Then it booted from a bootable CD.

Thanks Gents.
Steve, if that was the solution, you either have a bad contact in cable or connector, or a bad controller output
if i were you, i would reconnect it to the original one, to test
Trying to boot from a CD was a good tip.  Plugging in drive to another motherboard socket with existing cable fixed the problem.  Thanks everyone for the suggestions.