CDRom Doesn't Work When ITunes Is Installed

I am having the same issue but I don't have any solutions. Only frustration! Can you run iTunes at all or do you still have it installed?

I have had my computer for less than a week and I have spent >7hrs on the phone and researching on the internet with no resolution except that iTunes and Roxio are not compatible. Dell has replaced my CD/DVD drive, reinstalled the OS, deleted upper and lower filters for the drive....nothing has worked.

Is this a software issue for sure?

I've had this problem since about two updates ago. Really annoying- the best I've been able to get things to co-exist is to have Gateway get my cd/dvd rom working again- after that iTunes will say it has been installed improperly and it still won't let me burn cd, but at least the drive will read discs again. PLEASE FIX THIS APPLE! My iPod is old and I'll need to make a decision regarding a new MP3 player soon.

It appears by your comments, that we're both having the same issues. I just started using iTunes acouple weeks ago after I purchased my first iPod. My computer was behaving fine up until I installed iTunes. After the install and a reboot, I could not burn any CD's nor load any music via my DVD/CD Drive. ??? What happened? I right clicked on "My Computer" and the Drive had disappeared from there also. I contacted Dell (under warranty), they shipped me out a new DVD-CD/RW Drive. Same problem, the Drivers for the Drive were in conflict with something(?). Just last night, after 5 evenings with tech support from Dell, and UNINSTALLING iTunes 4 different times. The problem is narrowed down to:
iTunes; after uninstalling iTunes, the DVD-CD-RW Drive appears again. But after a restart, it disappears again. When iTunes is installing itself it is changing Registry Files, what the mystery is: What are iTunes Registry Files CONFLICTING WITH?? You might have hit it on the head, with your comment about other Disc Burning Software. I'm going to uninstall some other programs tonight and see if that solves my problem. Such as: ROXIO, Windows Movie Maker, a CD-W Backup Program, etc.... Conflict in Registry files might be with them.
I had to order an external harddrive to backup my computer and back up iTunes before the iTunes uninstall, because I could not use my DVD-CD/RW Drive, YES you will loose rights to your purchased items if you do not backup!!
My problems are not resolved yet, but you gave me something to look into this evening. Thank you for that. Check to see if your Computer is still recognizing your Burn Drive.
sorry this is so long, I've been completely obsessed with this problem for the past 2 weeks

I am bumping this up because it was shoved under the rug by apple before. I have since bought the iphone and I need my iphone for business contacts and calendar. It was nice that I was able to use my music again since microsoft fixed it with service pack....BUT presto apple disabled it again..

You want your CD/DVD drive working....just remove itunes..it will work
It is NOT a roxio /itunes issue I have ran both for the last month without a problem...that was until the update last week.

Apple needs to fix this...especially since I am told I can't sync my iphone on my Mac Pro since I set it up on PC...
I don't know if its true or not...just too afraid to find out.
Too many hours spent on the set up of my iphone and I need my phone for business.

Come on apple it's your turn to fix this..

I have a Compaq Presario F700 running Windows Vista and the same problem occured. After installing iTunes, I lost my CDROM drive (yellow exclamation point in device manager). After contacting HP, they guided me throught the process of modifying my registry after the installation of iTunes so I could my CDROM drive again (but still not use it in iTunes). So, I can have a working CDROM drive on my computer AND have iTunes. However, I can't use iTunes to burn discs. This problem seems so prevalent that I can't believe Apple won't change the way they work with CD burners.

In registry editor find the following:

HKEY LOCALMACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE1 0318}

Select the following fields (one at a time):
LowerFilters
UpperFilters

And delete them. Now my drive loads properly, but iTunes is not happy evidently it is iTunes that puts this lower and upper filter into the registry item.

I hope that is the same for your computers. BTW. Messing with the registry can be dangerous. You should read up on it separately if you are not familiar with making edits.

I had this same problem and had to do the registry editing nonsense with itunes version 7. But when I upgraded to Itunes 8.0 I lost the CD rom again. I saw under driver details there was a second CD ROM driver - GEARaspiWDM.sys and googled that. I ended up at a GEAR website that suggested to update the driver. Here is the link to download the driver:

http://www.gearsoftware.com/support/drivers.cfm

You have to reboot after installing (though it doesn't tell you that). After installing this I got my DVD/CDROM drive working again and realized my USB multicard reader had been disabled but was now back too.

I checked the driver version afterward, and believe it or not, it was the same as the old one. So this is probably something with itunes incorrectly installing or messing with the registry setting that GEAR uses, and a reinstall of the driver fixes it. It seems to me itunes updates are the common denominator for losing my drives.

Apple should definetely check into this. I really have no idea what GEAR is, but their website says itunes is a "GEAR powered product" whatever that means.

Yeah, yeah, OS X doesn't have a registry, but they sold me the ipod and software to work with Windows. Apple should figure out how to make it work with windows.

Hope this brings back your non-working CDROM / DVDROM for the other poor VISTA itunes users out there...

EXACTLY. Dell send me a new dvd player also. I have tried everything reformatted my computer. this really ****** me off. With earlier versions of itunes I had no problem. Now when I install an older version it says that since I have at one time had a newer version tht this old one won't work.

I used to like itunes, not I hate it. And if I want to burn with a windows product, it cannot read all of my itunes music

That is right. You can fix the lower and higer filters and dell did that for me, but as soon as itunes starts up, it sets them up again.

ARGHHHH! I’ve done everything…..but finally got itunes to work….on Vista Home Edition with the Matshita cd/dvd rom uj-852 or uj-862

First, after installing itunes, it would put an X in my cd/dvd rom in the device manager…If I took out the upper and lower filters in HKEY LOCALMACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE1 0318} (the one that says cd/dvd rom),
and uninstalled the cd/dvd rom in device manager, restarted my computer and let it reinstall, it would remove the X, but iTunes would stop working.

If I put GEARAspiWDM (return) back in Upperfilters using multi-string value, then iTunes would work, it would import and play, but it would say that it didn’t have supported discs when I tried to burn.

Here is what I did after reading every forum ever written about this:

1. Deleted any other burning software…and made sure it was deleted from the registry.
2. Grabbed the latest gearsoftware driver…they sent me a beta version… I renamed the older one and then used the newer one in windows/system32/drivers
3. Looked for Gearsec.exe, but it doesn’t run in Vista…so don’t worry about that
4. I didn’t find the following in my registry, so didn’t have to delete:
HKEY LOCAL MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Cdr4 2K
HKEY LOCAL MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Cdralw2k
HKEY LOCAL MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Cdudf
HKEY LOCAL MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\UdfReadr
5. I tried to install the latest sptd but I already had it (1.50)
6. I renamed afs driver to afs.txt from http://www.gearsoftware.com/wiki/index.php?title=CD/DVDdrives_disappear_after_installingiTunes
7. I installed the gear installer software but didn’t need that either
8. I never had installed daemon tools so that wasn’t a problem
9. I got a new cd/dvd drive from Lenovo (the uj-852)

THEN about a month into this….and a few gray hairs later…I ran into this one… http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1567?viewlocale=en_US

I went to iTunes, Help, Run CD Diagnostics…it said there was no audio cd, but there was because I had just imported one. So I continued the test and looked at the results. It said I wasn’t an administrator. I had seen this somewhere in one of the forums that they guy had turned off the UAC…but I had disregarded it. This time, I turned OFF the UAC…and VOILA!!! Some people were saying they did a “run as administrator” on iTunes but I couldn’t do that in home edition, so that’s what sort of got me thinking along those lines. I had gone to administrative tools, computer management, to find the administrator’s group and realized that home edition doesn’t have it set up that way …at any rate, that’s what made me try turning off the UAC.

Hi:

I just wanted to say THANKS for your input. I suspected that GEAR had something to do with this as while iTunes 8 was installing earlier today, Comodo Firewall Pro asked for permission to install GEAR components. Naturally, and knowing that this was part of iTunes 8, I gave confirmation to do so. On Rebooting the system I then lost access to both the CD- and DVD Burner installed on my system.

Having now installed GEAR's most current Driver (and subsequent to a Reboot), my Windows XP Home installation 'once again' sees my Internal Lite-On DVD Writer. However, my External LaCie CD Burner (connected via a Firewire 400 port) remains an orphan... Reinstalling the original drivers may afford a solution; time will tell.

iTunes 8 now whines that Registry Settings for both Importing and Burning CDs and DVDs are missing. I've been a user of iTunes (largely without incident) since its inception, so my perspective on this is no more or less than that of GEAR Software needing to get their act together.

So for those wanting to Flame Apple, me thinks that although Apple undoubtedly provided ample software specs. to GEAR, GEAR has failed to deliver. Otherwise, why would the Driver Update Link that you provided have been so usefull?

I've read other Forum Responses to this problem... including Registry Edits which were later circumvented by Apple's own software. Your solution, at least for myself, has proven to be the most productive.

Once again, My Thanks to You.

Ok, Apple has officially replaced Microsoft at the top of my hate list. After 3 Ipods, an Iphone, and an IBook, I've been rewarded with a hosed system for upgrading to Itunes 8 on my Windows XP. After multiple attempts at resolving the problem, I think I finally have it back in working condition (although I'm afraid to reboot because of system lockups). Here's my summary of what I did:

1: Uninstalled Itunes and QuickTime
2: Deleted the Upperfilters and Lowerfilters registry settings as suggested.
3: Reinstalled the Gears drivers
4: Reinstalled Itunes
5: Re-added the UpperFilter registry value 'GEARAspiWDM' as suggested in the thread

I did step 5 after running diagnostics from the ITUNES help. One of the error msgs alluded to the fact that I didn't have an UpperFilter. Once I re-added the filter, I clicked on burn disk in Itunes and it started going through the initialization steops, although it was extremely slow. I'm hoping that will resolve itself upon rebooting.

Apple, you need to send a nano or AppleTV my way for all of the trouble caused. Makes me want to dump my Apple stock before the Wall Street recognizes this growing issue.

Update: After rebooting and restarting Itunes, I tried to burn a cd without success. It found my hardware but the initialization process ran so slowly and consumed so much of the system's resources that my pc crashed. I searched Gears and Apple's site for a solution but no luck.

Out of pure curiosity, I uninstalled Itunes 8.0.2 and reinstalled 8.0.1, which I found through an internet search (no luck finding it through Apple). What do you know, ITunes started and I was able to burn a playlist in 5 minutes...Here's the kicker, I can't burn the CDs I bought using version 8.0.2 because of insufficient rights....Wait until I get ahold of Apple on Monday...Argh!!!