My next several Good Boots will be dedicated to how you can expeditiously resolve common annoyances if your technician is on vacation.

Many Good Booters have discovered after installing or reinstalling Windows 7 or after installing or uninstalling an application that has a CD/DVD filter driver they receive an error message ‘No compatible drives found’ and their CD, DVD and/or Blue-ray drive does not appear in their Windows Explorer Navigation pane.

The technical reason may be:
* The filter drivers in the CD/DVD/Blue-ray storage stack did not migrated successfully to Windows 7.
* An uninstalled application failed to properly remove itself from the registry.
* An installed application added filter drivers in the CD/DVD/Blue-ray storage stack that interfered with existing filters.

The non technical reason may be - ‘you’re simply experiencing a ‘you may never know why computer glitch’.

If you do experience a Windows Explorer CD\DVD\Blue-ray no-show I suggest your first attempt at resolving the problem should be to click your Start button and Control Panel. Click ‘Troubleshooting’ and in the left pane click ‘View all’ and ‘Playing and Burning CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray Discs’.

The troubleshooting Wizard may solve your problem.

If it doesn’t try the following.

Note: Do not be overly concerned about this Registry modification. It’s simple and benign.

1. Create a Systems Restore Point. (Start > Control Panel > System > System Protection > Create a restore point right now.)
2. Type regedit in your Start Search box.
3. Click regedit.exe in the Programs list.
4. Backup your Registry when you arrive at the Registry Edit pane. (Click ‘File’ and ‘Export’. Give the Registry backup file a name and Save it to a My Documents subfolder.)
5. Locate and then click on the little triangle to the left of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. You’ll see a list of subkeys.
6. Find HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\ {4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}.
7. To verify you’re in the appropriate registry subkey, make sure the (Default) data value is DVD/CD-ROM and the Class data value is CDROM.
3. In the right pane if there’s an UpperFilters and possibly a UpperFilters.bak entry, right click on them and click Delete. Click ‘Yes’ to confirm their removal.
4. In the right pane if there’s a LowerFilters and possibly a LowerFilters.bak entry, right-click on it and click Delete. Click ‘Yes’ to confirm their removal.

Exit Registry Editor and restart your computer. You should be back in business. If not, best you wait for your technician to return from vacation.
Keep this article tucked away. It’s a novice friendly remedy for a common computer illness.

Here’s wishing you a Good Boot.