Windows 7: Explorer fails to correctly recognise CD & DVD drives

In Windows Explorer, my CD and DVD drives are being shown incorrectly. The E drive (CD-ROM) is shown incorrectly as a DVD RW drive; and the F drive (DVD-RW) is shown incorrectly as a CD.

I've disabled and re-enabled both drives in Device Manager, as well as re-assigning new drive letters to each of the drives. All drivers are up to date, as is the BIOS (version 2002).


It seems that Microsoft recognise this problem (Windows Explorer does not correctly recognize the DVD drive and the DVD disc after you use Windows DVD Maker to create a DVD disc in Windows 7 or in Windows Server 2008 R2), but when I run this Hotfix, it tells me that it's not applicable to my system, so presumably it thinks I've not got a problem.

I am therefore unable to boot from either the CD or DVD drives, even though I've changed the Boot Device Priority in BIOS (and F10'd this change). I've also pressed F8 to get the Boot Menue to select one of the optical drives, but it makes no difference. Both drives are otherwise working perfectly.




It seems that because Windows Explorer is incorrectly identifying these two drives, the BIOS is therefore looking at the wrong physical drive to boot from. Would this be correct? So if I've selected the CD-ROM drive in the BIOS Boot Priority as the 1st Priority Drive, then the BIOS is actually looking to boot from the DVD drive.


I need to run a disk diagnostic on one of my HDD's due to a SMART report. This software has to be booted up from an ISO image burned to a CD.


Any suggestions please?