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Troubleshooting a missing CD/DVD-ROM drive in a Windows virtual machine (1014268)

Symptoms

The Windows Device Manager reports:

Windows cannot load the device driver for this hardware. The driver may be corrupted or missing. (Code 39)

Resolution

This is a Microsoft-recognized issue that occurs independently of Fusion.

For a solution and a downloadable utility for your virtual machine, see this Microsoft Knowledge Base article: Your CD drive or DVD drive is missing or is not recognized by Windows or other programs.

For virtual machines running Windows 2000, see the Microsoft Knowledge Base article 270008.

Warning: Before you implement the solution in these articles, VMware recommends that you backup the virtual machine's registry. For more information, see the Microsoft Knowledge Base article 322756.

Note: The preceding links were available as of September 30, 2010. If you find the links to be broken, provide feedback on the article and a VMware employee will update the article as necessary.

Additional Information

The instructions in the Microsoft article intrust you to remove entries from the registry. If the CD / DVD drive does not appear after restarting Windows, or appears after some restarts and disappears after others, in addition to removing those entries from the CurrentControlSet, you may need to remove the same entries from the other ControlSet<x> subkeys.

If you are still having trouble with your CD / DVD drive after following the steps in this article, see Making sure you can use the CD/DVD drive in a Fusion virtual machine (1025943).

Update History

04/13/10 - Removed link for XP/Vista that now goes to empty content 05/21/2010 - Added disclaimer concerning browser functionality. 06/11/2010 - Added separate link for Vista. 07/30/2010 - Added symptoms. 08/06/2010 - Added link to 1025943. 09/30/2010 - Replaced OS-specific links with one link that covers all 3. Added note about other ControlSets.

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