Windows Media Player 11 will not recognize my internal CD burner

I have a Dell Inspiron 8100 With Windows XP Service Pack 2. I have a Sony CD
-RW burner that is an internal CD burner. Windows Media Player 11 (WMP) dose
not see this device when I open WMP and select the burn option. When I go to
options, WMP shows my Sony CD burner on its device list, so I know that it it
is there. I do not understand why WMP 11 is asking me to connect an external
CD burner when it should be looking at my internal Sony CD burner? What steps
should I take to get WMP 11 to see that my internal Sony burner is there and
use it?

[asabur5]

Does the Sony have a "Recording" tab listed on it when you view the
Properties for it in Explorer?

I was having the same problem with my Sony CD/RW crx216e. I did what you said. Although, I was sort of skeptical, but desperate. My husband is a DJ and I really needed my burner to work with WMP because I like it better than Deepburner (and it was acting up with Deepburner anyway). And I hate messing with the registry's. But it worked !! I noted that that 'devmgmt' didnt pull up the device manager for me, but Im glad I new that I had to pull up device manager so I got to it anyway. And uninstalling my burner was scary but when I restarted it found it right away and worked fine. WMP said 'install a blank cd' instead of 'connect burner and restart' or whatever just like you said.

[Peter Papay]

I am not sure if the following would work for you or not. I have an hp pavilion 780n computer with Windows XP. A while back for unknown reasons Windows stopped recognizing the built-in burner drive, like it wasn’t there at all. I talked to a techie and he told me to do the steps below, after which my drive was recognized again. Recently for unknown reasons only my WMP 11 stopped recognizing my burner. In the upper right corner it asked me to plug one in and restart the WMP. I searched on the Internet and found some suggestions, but none of them solved the problem. Then, I thought about the advice the techie gave me and tried it. It worked. My WMP 11 is now able to burn again. I don’t know if it would work for you, maybe it could mess things up!!! In any event, this is what the techie told me to do:

First of all remove any disk from the drive
Start > Run > Type Regedit > Ok
Click on + next to Hkey_Local_Machine
+ next to System
+ next to Current control set
+ next to Control
+ next to Class
Left click on (4d36e965-e325-11ce-bfc1-08002be10318)
On the right hand side look for Upper Filters and Lower Filters
Right click on Upper Filters and click on delete
Right click on Lower Filters and click on delete
Restart the computer
Start > Run > Type devmgmt > Ok
Click on + next to DVD/CD-ROM drives
Right click on the burner drive (in my case it was HP DVD CD-ROM 100j)
Click on uninstall
Restart computer

On the bottom of the screen I got a message saying the computer found a new device, and installed it. I tried my WMP and now it asked for a blank CD in the burn menu instead of where is the burner? Good luck.

[richkranium]

What if you find no upper & lower filters to remove?

[dcsmile3]

I found that Peter Papay's method did work for me.... Too bad windows media couldn't just give us those directions.....