I connected to a customer today that said their DVD/CD drive wasn’t working. I checked the device manager and I instantly saw what the issue was. The DVD drive had a yellow warning triangle over it, indicating the driver was missing or wasn’t working.

PLDS DVD+-RW DH-16AAS ATA Device Driver Warning

I right-clicked on the PLDS DVD+ RW DH-16AAS ATA Device and got properties of the DVD drive. This is the message the driver gave me.  A driver (service) for this device has been disabled. An alternate driver maybe providing the functionality. 

It took me a while to find the solution but this is what fixed it for me. You won’t even need to install a new driver, its a simple registry fix.

Step One: Go to Device Manager and right click on the DVD drive and uninstall the device.

Step Two: ( Please backup your registry before doing this) Open Regedit. Navigate to registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\CLASS\4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318 . (Please see update at bottom of article if this registry path doesn’t work for you). Once you click on the 4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318 folder go to the right hand side and delete the UpperFilters and LowerFilters registry keys.

Step Three: Restart your computer. Log into your computer and your DVD drive will work properly, if you check device manager there will no longer be a yellow warning sign.

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Update: 1/19/16  I recently ran into this issue again. This fix worked flawlessly again for me. The only thing different this time was that the offending files were residing under the following registry path: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\CLASS\4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318 . So if the first registry path doesn’t work for you, make sure to check at the location referred to above! Thanks

This was posted by techspeeder.

Kudos to The Crzyman782 for this helpful tip.