This has happened to me a couple of times. I have spent a lot of time trying to fix issues caused by damaged CD drivers on windows. Since this wasted time eats at development productivity, this article is intended to assist developers (or administrators) to fix this issue if they have it. Bookmark this blog entry if you don’t have it, you never know when it will happen to you and this may save you time in the future.
Windows does not have a native means of mounting .ISO files or other CD images. I don’t think that prior sentence does justice to the full weight of the intended communication, so let me try again.
The primary, commercial, expensive, professional Operating System that is Microsoft Windows, includes no means to mount a CD image. After paying for your operating system, the consumer is expected to purchase and/or download third party software to be able to perform this mundane operation.
I cannot think of any other Operating System shipping a decade into the 21st century that is this archaic. I use Magic/Disk to mount my images, but now and again I lose all access to my CD drives, both physical or virtual, especially if I do something crazy with the OS image – like migrate it from physical to virtual, or change the underlying virtualization platform from one thing to another (e.g.: from VirtualBox to VMware or KVM). This also seems to happen from time to time after I upgrade something, anything – OS, Magic/ISO or Virtual Machine client utilities. When this loss of CD Drives happens it is almost impossible to reset things. Uninstalling and reinstalling any manner of utilities and or drivers simply does not seem to help. Next you will be tempted to begin editing the registry – don’t do it.
I ran across a simple solution that I have used on at least three occasions successfully. Simply download and execute the attached .reg file. It contains registry settings that reset the CD Drivers to standard configurations. It has never failed to reset the sanity in my systems.
If you think this is all a bit risky you are correct. You were forced into this risky position when you were forced to begin adding third party software just to be able to mount media images on your ‘21st century’ operating system. Blaming the quality of the 3rd party drivers is putting the blame in the wrong place. OSX and Linux are both orders of magnitude cheaper than Windows, with far smaller numbers of users than Windows, and far smaller number of developers building the product. Yet, both Linux and OSX manage this without fuss. I certainly hope Windows 8 fixes this.
May this be useful to you.
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