DVD issue and the not-so-helpful error codes
I was playing Rise of Legends over the last few days. After a late night session the day before, I woke up to find that my DVD drive had disappeared. It was physically present, but for some reason it just wouldn't play a movie, a cd and certainly not the game. Flabbergasted, I looked at the Device Manager and discovered an exclamation mark beside the DVD drive. It appeared that I had a pioneer dvd. The error code said that my drivers were corrupted and that I needed to reinstall my DVD driver. Go figure. It's a Pioneer (which, I for some reason, keep spelling Pinoeer) K17 DVDR. After much head bashing, and searching – I happen to consider myself very good at searching – I had to finally give up. Resorting to forums, I found a couple of posts.
One said, I had to reinstall the Operating System. I wasn't willing to do that. Looking at the error code (39) – find explanation here – I had very little hope. Then I came across another post that talked about clearing out a couple of entries in the registry. That rang a bell – I'd read something about that ages ago. I decided to chance it. It's my work machine, and it's a Microsoft game – I figured, I could talk to support. And so I tried the KB article's instructions (Manual – not the automatic stuff) and to my surprise (not really), it worked!
Here's the article for your use. I hope you'll save yourself some trouble at some point because of it.
Article Title: (it worked for my error code 39 too).
You can no longer access the CD drive or the DVD drive, or you receive an error message after you remove a CD recording program or a DVD recording program in Windows XP: "error code 31"
