Lost cd / dvd drives

[Gus]

Hi:

- Through my own fault, I have lost my CD / DVD drives on Windows 7. I am running the Asus P5B Deluxe Wifi with 4 Gb Ram and a 320 Gb hardrive. Have a EVGA 9500GT vid card.
My CD / DVD drives show up in BIOS as [IDE: Lite-On DVDRW] drives. One of them is actually the first boot drive. They are also recognized on Post but, do not show up on drive list nor in Hardware / Device Manager.
When I insert an auto loading CD etc. nothing happens. I cannot open the drive folder to see what is on the CD or DVD as I have no reference point. The drive works fine if I insert a boot Disk in at boot time. It will then load drivers etc. and carry on but will not show nor work in windows.
Is there any way I can get the two drives back without re-installing windows7?
Any help would be most appreciated.

Gus:

[peterm69]

http://windows7news.com/2009/01/15/w...ing-dvd-drive/ this might help but back your registery up 1st.

[Gus]

Hey Peterm69:
Tried the windows news trick after backing up registry. It didn't work for me but thanks for the suggestion anyhow.

Gus:

[peterm69]

did you try option 2 as well?

[Gus]

Hi Peterm69

Oops. I tried option 2 first. Having gone back on option 1, I can find no UpperFilters nor LowerFilters entry under the particular key class. It does refer to CD drives though but no filters.

Gus:

[Gus]

Hi Folks:

Let's consider this thread closed. I finally bit the bullet and went to a much earlier restore point and restored the system. The drives came back and work fine. This of course didn't really help me find out the way to possibly correct the same type of problem immediately in the future except by restoring the system to an earlier time.
Thank you all for your suggestions and I really would have liked one of them to do the job.

Gus: