DVD Driver Problems - Please Help!

Hi peeps:

just spent an age uninstalling all the bloatware and tidying the registry etc. after doing a partial recovery - but now my DVD drive isn't working

My notebook is the FE31H (although it may well be called something different elsewhere - its the new Core2Duo FE notebook) and the drive (according to Device Manager) is: MAT****A DVD-RAM UJ-850S

there is an exclamation mark next to the device and in properties, it says "Windows cannot load the device driver for this hardware. The driver may be corrupted or missing. (Code 39)"

Now i have a feeling that this occured when i uninstalled the WinDVD software, although i couldn't be sure.

It goes without saying but no DVD/CD drive shows up in My Computer.

I have tried:

• uninstalling the driver and clicking "scan for hardware changes", it replaces it but with the same exclamation mark problem

• looking for a firmware update, but tho only one i can find won't work (says i dont have the right hardware to match the firmware)

now, since i dont seem to have any drivers available to me, i'm in a bit of a pickle... can anyone help me out PLEASE dont tell me i have to recover again... if this is the case the laptop's going back to the sony centre

Oh yeah, also tried windows update to no avail...

 

What DVD program were you going to use to run your DVD player? I ask only because if you install your new DVD player software, it should come with its own set of drivers. If not, you may have to go the long way and re install the driver from Sony Support. I say long way because you may have to re load the Sony library. This will not be too difficult. Simply go to the complete drivers listing on Sony Support for your unit, and start a trial and error process. The reason I mention the library is because a lot of Sony installed stuff sraws from that library. You will not have to recover. That would be totally unnecessary.

 

Well, i installed the PowerDVD trial to see if that would sort it but no success... i have looked through all the supplied drivers and there is not one even vaguely related to DVD hardware... audio, bluetooth, camera... ...video, wireless lan. No CD drive stuff

it will not budge from its current messed up state - any other ideas?

 

One important question: Was the CD/DVD drive operating normally before you uninstalled the bloatware? Was it reading both CDs and DVDs?

 

I think at this point that you need to thoroughly uninstall ALL DVD software and then reinstall the one of your choice and the drivers for it. Get the drivers from the Sony Support page. If you cannot find them on your model page then go to the SZ support site or sony support site and download the driver from there. Read all of the info it gives you before downloading to ensure that you have any linked requirements like the Sony library.

 

Here is the firmware update for the DVD for the SZ:

http://esupport.sony.com/perl/swu-download.pl?mdl=VGNS480&upd_id=2048&os_id=7

 

UPDATE!!!

Thought i'd post an update to this problem to help out future generations

The problem was as simple as this: Don't uninstall " Sonic CD & DVD Burning" from Add/Remove Programs -> Windows Components... It'll screw up your drive

Took me HOURS to find this out, but i did it by using my image program to make incremental changes so they could be seamlessly rolled back, by the way, with these VAIOs and their tendancy to give you no option about the bloatware that comes pre-installed, i highly recommend "Acronis True Image" - basically a much slicker and much more professional (IMO) version of Norton Ghost... once you have uninstalled everything and defragged, cleaned the registry and all the stuff that is to be done if you are as pedantic with computers as me, slap it in an True Image on a different partition. Then whenever you want to go back to the nice crisp start point (or any point you back up come to think of it) you just restore the image, takes about 5 minutes and you don't even have to install the program if you dont want!!! (it can all be done via a bootable cd!)

so there we are... moral of the story is: don't uninstall the sonic cd and dvd thing