Several of my customers have had their Optical Drive (CD/DVD) disappear from their My Computer after uninstalling or installing a program. It can also be caused by some virii so be aware.

Most of the time, its old left-over registry entries by the programs that remain after removal that cause the problem.

To fix this follow these steps:

1. Go to Start button (lower left hand corner), go to RUN, type REGEDIT
2. Navigate to
   1. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\
   2. SYSTEM\
   3. ControlSet001\
   4. Control\
   5. Class\
   6. {4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}
3. Delete the UpperFilters and LowerFilters Keys.

Restart your system and you should see the drive. You may be prompted to reinstall it upon start-up.

For anyone out there who downloaded the newest pirated whatever and has no clue what do with the unknown files. Most of the time, when someone shares a file, it is compressed or in a contained format (iso, bin/cue, nrg, cd image, etc.).

A quick note: When files are shared over the net, they are usually broken down into several smaller, more easily downloadable, files. This way, if part of the file is corrupt, you only have to download maybe one or two 50mb files vs a single 1gb file.

.RAR, .R01, .R02, .001, .002, etc. – A RAR archive. Unzip it with WinRAR or a variety of other compression utilities.

.DAA — PowerISO Direct-Access-Archive. – Use the program PowerISO.

.Bin/Cue – Disk Image. – Mount it with a Virtual CD utility (Alcohol 120%, Daemon Tools) or burn it with most popular CD burning applications (Nero, etc.).