The inspector scans all optical drives that are connected to the PC to display detailed information about each of the discovered devices.

This ranges from basic information like the vendor and drive letter to advanced information like the device’s firmware, serial number, region code, read features and, if it is a writer, writing features.

The information can be used to determine a device’s capabilities, handy to troubleshoot issues and before buying blanks or media.

But the information can also be used to verify that the manufacturer did indeed add the right CD, DVD or Blu-Ray drive to the PC.

VSO Inspector displays all devices in a pulldown menu at the top. The software comes with additional interesting options.

A Check for Firmware Update button is displayed at the bottom of the application. A click on the button triggers a Google search for “download device model”.

Media can be inserted into the drive to check its type and compatibility with the selected device.

The Scan tab can run a surface scan and file test on a disc with data that is inserted into the drive. VSO Inspector can scan all disc sectors or only specified sectors. The speed, time remaining and percentage of good, problematic and erroneous sectors is updated constantly during the scan.

VSO Inspector reveals all relevant information about connected CD, DVD or Blu-Ray readers and writers. The software program is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Microsoft Windows operating system. A downloaded is offered at the VSO Software website.

Some Windows users on the other hand experience problems with their CD and DVD drives that have nothing to do with this feature. Microsoft describes the problem the following way:

Your CD drive or DVD drive is missing or not recognized by Windows or other programs, so you cannot play or access a CD or DVD. This issue might have occurred after you installed, uninstalled, or updated a program or Windows Vista.

This is a generic description. Users who scroll down on the Knowledgebase page find details at the end of the page:

This issue may have occurred after one of the following situations:

• You upgrade a computer to Windows Vista or install Windows Vista Service Pack 1.
• You install or uninstall CD or DVD recording programs.
• You uninstall Microsoft Digital Image.

You may see one of the following error messages: One of the following error messages appears when you view the CD drive or the DVD drive in Device Manager.

• Error message 1 – The device is not working properly because Windows cannot load the drivers required for this device (Code 31).
• Error message 2 – A driver for this device was not required, and has been disabled (Code 32 or Code 31).
• Error message 3 – Your registry might be corrupted. (Code 19)
• An “error code 39″ error message.
• A message that resembles the following appears in the notification area:
  Windows successfully loaded the device driver for this hardware but cannot find the hardware device. (Code 41)

Users should check the CD drive or DVD drive in the Device Manager before they apply the Fix-It solution.

The Knowledgebase article offers instructions on how to manually fix the issue as well. Windows 7 users can use the Playing and Burning CDs, DVDs, and Blu‑ray Discs troubleshooter (link), while Vista and XP users have to edit the Windows Registry.

No word out yet if Microsoft will develop a patch to fix the issue permanently.

when I checked the properties of the devices the device status message read “Windows cannot start this hardware device because its configuration information (in the registry) is incomplete or damaged. To fix this problem you should uninstall and then reinstall the hardware device. (Code 19)”.

A fix was proposed in the error message and that was the first thing I did. I uninstalled the affected devices in the Windows Device Manager and rebooted the computer system. The bios of the computer was picking up the DVD drive fine and Windows recognized it as well. The operating system began to install the DVD drives but was not able to install the drivers in the so that I was still left with the dreaded error 19.

The next thing I tried was a Microsoft Fix It solution that is supposed to help in the following cases:

* The filter drivers in the CD and the DVD storage stack are not migrated successfully to Windows Vista.
* You uninstalled CD software that fails to properly remove itself in the registry.
* You installed software that adds filter drivers in the CD and the DVD storage stack that interfere with existing filters.

The Fix It has been designed for Windows Vista but is fully compatible with Windows 7 as well. It did not work on the other hand but the filter drivers reference finally got me on the right track.

I fired up the Registry Editor by pressing Win-R, typing regedit and hitting enter. The Registry key containing the filter information of the optical drives is using the path

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

I located the UpperFilters entry and removed it by selecting it and pressing Del on the keyboard. I had no LowerFilters entry which should be removed as well if it exists.

The device drivers were installed once again after the reboot and they this time installed without errors. Please note that this Registry key is only helpful if the CD-Rom or DVD drive is not recognized properly by Windows. Error code 19 is a common error that is displayed to all kinds of devices. Your best bet in this case is to search for terms like device error 19 Registry fix or device error 19 upperfilters or similar searches.

There are several reports and support requests in the search engines that describe problems with CD and DVD drive recognition in Windows 7 and other Microsoft operating systems. There is unfortunately not the one solution to fix all of the issues with CD DVD drives but a good start is Rizone’s CD-DVD Repair which is a portable software program that tries to fix missing or unrecognized CD and DVD drives in Windows 7 and other Microsoft operating systems.

The application comes with two additional options to reset the drive’s autorun settings and to protect the CD DVD drive against autorun parasites. A click on the Repair CD-DVD button will initiate the repair of the drives. It will also apply the two additional options if they have been selected by the user.

A restart of the computer system is required to complete the operation. Rizone’s CD-DVD Repair may not be able to repair all issues that are encountered by users. It is sometimes necessary to download new drivers or even update the firmware of the drive to make it compatible with Windows. A link to a website that is collecting firmware updates is given in the program interface as well.

It is usually a good idea to visit the manufacturer’s website first to see if there are driver or firmware updates for the CD DVD drive and apply those before running CD-DVD Repair.

CD-DVD Repair is a portable software program for the Windows operating system that can be downloaded by the developer’s website.

Total Mounter comes with support for many disk image formats including iso, bin, b5i, mdf, cdi, nrg, ccd, sub, img and raw. Even better is the fact that the program does not have to be running after mounting a disk image which will obviously reduce its memory footprint and resource usage. Up to eight drives can be emulated by the software program. Images can be mounted in the application’s interface. One interesting aspect of Total Mounter is the ability to create virtual CD-RW and DVD-RW drives that can be used to write date to a virtual CD or DVD drive.

Another interesting feature provided by the software is the virtual disk creation option. This makes it possible to create and mount virtual disks from within the application. TotalMounter will install a new driver to the computer system during installation to offer the functionality.It also offers the following niche features that might be interesting to some users:

• Provides a iSCSI Initiator for mount iStorage Server and other iSCSI Target.
• Provides a INetDisk client for mount INetDisk Server.
• Provides a network-bridged method. It exports an existing partition, disk, CD/DVD-ROM to clients as a virtual iSCSI drive.

The program is easy to use and does support most image formats that are popular these days.

The Windows operating system – at least Windows XP – is not offering name editing for DVD drives. At least not the easy way. You might know that it is possible to change the drive letter of a hard drive in Windows by right-clicking its icon and selecting Properties. The very same option is grayed out for DVD drives and probably other drive types as well.

Some solutions are floating around on the Internet that involve Registry editing which is something that most inexperienced users do not want to do. A far better solution is a small program called Drive Namer which has been requested and completed at the Donation Coder forum a long time ago.

Drive Namer is a small portable application for the Windows operating system that can change the name of any drive letter easily. It has been primarily designed to work with DVD drives and other drive types with locked name editing. The program requires the Microsoft .net Framework 2.0 to run but does not have any other requirements.

It will display the small form upon startup that provides a pull down menu for all drive letters of the computer system including those not in use. Changing the drive letter of a DVD drive would simply involve selecting the correct drive letter of the DVD drive from the menu and entering a name in the form next to it. A click on the SET button will enable the name on the system which can be checked in Windows Explorer.

Windows Explorer Before

Windows Explorer After

The names can be reset by selecting a drive letter and pressing the Reset button in the software program. The software does not have to be running after the names of the DVD drives have been edited.

The original location of Drive Namer is no longer providing the file download for the application. You can download it below right from the Ghacks server. The download has a size of 10 Kilobytes. There is also a download link at the Donation Coder website pointing to a file host. Could go down in the future which is why we provide the download mirror as well.

drive namer

The question now is if there is a way to lock the DVD drive in Windows Explorer. Locking meaning that it will not be accessed in any way when a user opens Windows Explorer, a file browser or any other means of accessing files on his computer system. Ideally the program should be able to determine direct DVD access and allow that from happening.

The only viable solution so far is to create a disk image of the DVD in the drive and mount it using a software that emulates CD drives. This is however not a perfect solution. It would be much easier to have a on and off button for the DVD drive or a program running that would automatically perform the operation. Actually there is one additional solution which would involve removing the DVD from the drive whenever it is not needed and putting it back in whenever it is needed.

Question is: Do you know of a program that can lock the DVD drive so that the DVD will not be accessed when accessing Windows Explorer?

Optical drives are sensible and can break easily if enough pressure is applied. CD / DVD Drive Locker puts an end to this fear by locking selected optical drives of a computer system. The software program is easy to use. Just select the optical drives that should be locked and move them to the list of locked drives with the click of a button. Unlocking works practically the same.

While kids – or more specifically parents – are the main target for the application it might also make sense under other circumstances. Could be useful to lock the optical laptop drive to avoid that the drive opens accidentally.

Credit goes to Instant Fundas for finding the application. They missed to include a link to the application though. CD / DVD Drive Locker is compatible with Windows XP, Windows Vista or Windows 2000.

Virtual CloneDrive is a software that emulates up to eight virtual CD and DVD drives on the system. Each appears in Windows Explorer with its own drive letter and the user can perform the usual operations such as installing software from or exploring the CD or DVD that has been mounted.

The software works by adding two new entries to the right-click context menu in Windows Explorer that only appear when right-clicking a virtual CD drive. That makes mounting and unmounting new images overly complicated. I liked how Daemon Tools provided a system tray icon that could be used to mount and unmount images easily.

Several popular image formats are supported including iso, dvd and img but it does not support all the image formats that were supported by Daemon Tools Lite.

The software has a low computer memory consumption while it is running. It used up only 3 Megabytes of computer memory while emulating one virtual drive. Raising that number did not have a huge impact on the memory consumption.

The application had to be started again to add or remove virtual CD drives from the system. Mounting and working with those CD and DVD images on the other hand was uncomplicated. The application lacks an interface that is accessible while using it. It would also be nice to be able to mount images by right-clicking them or loading them from the program’s interface. Currently the only other option available is to assign the file extensions to Virtual CloneDrive so that a double-click would mount them.

Benchmarking a CD or DVD drive makes only sense if you can compare the results. This can be useful if you can test several CD or DVD writers before making a decision which to build into the computer or if you want to know how your drive compares to similar drives. If the benchmarking process does not throw up an error or stops midway you can almost be sure that the drive is not damaged mechanically.

The disc quality test is more interesting. It tests the quality of a created disc displaying a quality score at the end. A score above 80 is acceptable and everything above 90 is very good. I usually analyse the disc using the Scandisc function if the quality score lies beneath 80. This is also a great way to test burned media from time to time to make sure it does not contain any bad or unreadable sectors.

Nero Disc Speed comes in handy if you suspect that your DVD or CD drive is not working correctly or if you want to check the quality of the burned discs.