Physical CD-ROM drive not recognized by Windows

[kaldea]

Hi! Thanks for the time. Anyhow, I'm having trouble on my laptop with a CD-ROM drive that is going undetected on my computer in explorer, device manager, disk management, and in pretty much everything else :(. I'm pretty certain the problem in linked to me using a virtual drive (in poweriso), that defaulted the virtual drive's name to E: (which was what the drive was; thanks poweriso!). I was able to solve the problem earlier by disabling auto start from poweriso and renaming my virtual drive to F:, and I was able to run a dvd earlier tonight, however after I took the dvd out to put a new one in, the drive E: disappeared again, making this all the more irritating! So I'm pretty sure that eliminates the possibility of a hardware problem...
I've tried uninstalling poweriso, and reinstalling it, rebooting my notebook multiple times, different cds, everything short of messing around in my registry, reinstalling windows, and opening up my laptop to replug in my cd-rom drive so windows will detect it, (three things I would REALLY prefer not to do...) So if you know of any fixes short of these three I would really be thankful :I...!

And for the info I am using an HP Pavilion dv5000 laptop with Windows XP SP2 Media Center Edt.
Thanks so much for the help again!

[Suspishio]

Did you search this forum for similar threads? There have been various reports and various resolutions including this one from Micrisoft:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314060

[kaldea]

Yes I looked around, (which is how I got to this site), but none seemed to be like mine in that they were caused by CD recording software and not virtual drives, as Microsoft's fix did not do anything for my pc. Maybe these problems are caused by the same underlaying problem, however, I tried all the fixes offered for this problem caused by CD writing software with no success :\. I dont even have that item they are talking about in my registry...

[Suspishio]

If PowerISO is the problem, then I can't help you. What would I do if a theoretically nice piece of software was causing problems?

I would get the llatest version or look for bug fix statements in PowerIso's README.

I would search the web as you've done - but that rarely provides the answers!

I would find another way of doing what PowerISO does; if the CD bay is now used for something else, I'd buy an external device and use the assigned drive letter from Windows.

That sort of thing.