USB Optical Drive not detected on Surface Pro 4 but is on other Windows 10 systems

Question

I have an external optical drive that used to work great on my Surface Pro 4 but after a recent update (or something that changed the behavior) this Surface Pro 4 no longer seems to understand the concept of an Optical Drive. When I plug in my USB optical drive I hear the USB device connected sound, Device Manager redisplays like it's going to do something, but then nothing. There is no CD/DVD Device option even available in the Device Manager menu on my Surface Pro 4 but there is on all of my other Windows 10 machines. Again, this device is fine, it works on every one of my other Windows 10 machines.

I just Reset this Surface Pro 4 and had it clear everything hoping somehow things got messed up over the time I have owned it. That didn't work either so it definitely isn't some system corruption that has happened.

I have read countless reviews about this issue and all of the "solutions" aren't solutions because they don't address the issue that Windows doesn't even have the concept of a CD/DVD Drive option in the Device Manager, but it used to. Was this an intentional change by Microsoft since it seems to be specific to my Surface Pro 4? Any thoughts on a fix for this?

Answer 1

Was this reset from a downloadable recovery image?

Have you now updated to 17134/1803 and gone to Settings, Windows Updates and

downloaded and installed all available updates?

Brand and model of Optical drive?

>I just Reset this Surface Pro 4 and had it clear everything hoping somehow things got messed up over the time I have owned it.

Answer 2

Thanks for the reply.

The Reset was performed natively on the machine itself. I don't know the proper lingo but how I did it was with these steps:

• Settings -> Update & Security -> Recovery
• Under Reset this PC I selected "Get started"
• selected option"Remove everything"

I let that grind. Did the Windows updates and plugged in my USB optical drive and it still doesn't work. If there is another more clean way of doing it, tell me how and I will give that a try.

 I did the update. My system says it's running 1803.

The device is a Asus SBW-06D2X-U.

Here you can see a screenshot of the Device Manager on my Surface Pro that doesn't even depict DVD/CD-ROM drives as an available option with the drive plugged in.

And here is a screenshot of Device Manager from another Windows 10 machine with the USB optical drive connected to it.

And here are the driver details on that other Windows 10 machine:

In checking my Surface Pro 4, the cdrom.sys file is present but WsOMFlt.sys is not.I tried manually copying that missing file over but it didn't help.

I appreciate any help you can provide to get this working.

Answer 3

And this drive was working before without needing a USB powered HUB? I'm

wondering what might change if you used a POWERED USB hub and plugged the

optical drive into that and then plugged the hub into your SP4. It would be

strange that it worked before without a hub, but worth trying. Guessing that the

device requires 2 USB ports??

Answer 4

The device does not require 2 USB ports. If you read the documentation you'll see the second connector is for full speeds but it will run at lower speeds on a single one.

It did work before and works today with only one connector plugged in. I already demonstrated to you that the device works with a single port on another machine.

Answer 5

I just tried a powered USB hub with both connectors plugged in. It still doesn't work on the Surface Pro 4 and does work on all of my other Windows 10 machines and Linux machines as well.