When I opened Device manager, there was an exclamation mark on the drive named “HL-DT-ST DVD RAM GT33N”. When I check the drive properties in device manager, the status showed said “Windows cannot load the device driver for this hardware. The driver may be corrupted or missing. (Code 39)”
On researching further I found that problem is faced by many Windows users across different brand of laptop & desktop computers with different brand of DVD / CD or Blu-Ray Disk optical drives. The reason behind this may be a hardware failure (which was unlikely in my case as the laptop was just one month old and optical drive was hardly used) or driver corruption or drive letter assignment error or some registry error. A hardware error can not be resolved using a software and requires replacement of part. Driver corruption in such case is unlikely as the driver is very generic and does not require an external installation. Drive letter assignment is one possibility which can be resolved in disk management. Try it before using the last solution given below) but in my case, the DVD drive was not even listed in the Drive Management list!
Finally after some searching online, I came across a very effective and lightweight tool which to resolved my problem. This free software is called “XP-CD-DVD Fix”. Don’t worry by the name XP in the name of software as it works perfect on Windows Vista, Windows 7 and also Windows 8 as well. You can download this freeware tool from its official page here. Extract the Zip file, run the .EXE which will show a small window like on below. Do right click on the tool and select run as administrator to run this tool. Simply click the repair button on this too.
Click repair removed any bad registry entries which might be clashing with the correct registry values required to make your optical drive work. You need to restart you computer for the DVD / CD or Blu-Ray Drive to come back to Windows Explorer or My Computer. Also please note, that you may have to run this tool twice, after you restart, run the tool and restart again if the Drive does not come back in first attempt. It worked for me when I ran this tool second time.
It did solve the problem on my Lenovo Thinkpad Edge E420 with HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GT33N DVD Drive, I hope this tool will help you too. If this helps you, please let us know by comments below. Do share it with your friends.......thx..
On researching further I found that problem is faced by many Windows users across different brand of laptop & desktop computers with different brand of DVD / CD or Blu-Ray Disk optical drives. The reason behind this may be a hardware failure (which was unlikely in my case as the laptop was just one month old and optical drive was hardly used) or driver corruption or drive letter assignment error or some registry error. A hardware error can not be resolved using a software and requires replacement of part. Driver corruption in such case is unlikely as the driver is very generic and does not require an external installation. Drive letter assignment is one possibility which can be resolved in disk management. Try it before using the last solution given below) but in my case, the DVD drive was not even listed in the Drive Management list!
Finally after some searching online, I came across a very effective and lightweight tool which to resolved my problem. This free software is called “XP-CD-DVD Fix”. Don’t worry by the name XP in the name of software as it works perfect on Windows Vista, Windows 7 and also Windows 8 as well. You can download this freeware tool from its official page here. Extract the Zip file, run the .EXE which will show a small window like on below. Do right click on the tool and select run as administrator to run this tool. Simply click the repair button on this too.
Click repair removed any bad registry entries which might be clashing with the correct registry values required to make your optical drive work. You need to restart you computer for the DVD / CD or Blu-Ray Drive to come back to Windows Explorer or My Computer. Also please note, that you may have to run this tool twice, after you restart, run the tool and restart again if the Drive does not come back in first attempt. It worked for me when I ran this tool second time.
It did solve the problem on my Lenovo Thinkpad Edge E420 with HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GT33N DVD Drive, I hope this tool will help you too. If this helps you, please let us know by comments below. Do share it with your friends.......thx..
