cd roms are gone?

[visualuser]

I just ran a restore on a HP Pavilion XT936. After that I ran all appropriate windows updates. I then setup the latest softwar. After everything was done, I had 2 pci serial cards listed in other devices that I knew I had to fix. I downloaded the drivers then updated and they showed up at come 5,6, and 7.

After the restore, I noticed the cd-writer light randomly blinked. There is another drive for the dvd. Now, when I go to my computer, both the dvd and the cdrw drive are gone. The cdrw drive does not have power but the dvd will open.

Neither show up in my computer. What's strange is that before I had a m and a n drive. Now it's just one C drive.

What's going on. This is windows me. That's one of my problems.... but still, what's the deal here. All power is connected too.

Help.....

ps. HP's support is crap for this pc. I wanted to update the bios but you can only order the cd, no downloadable drivers are available.

 

[edfair]

What does the mangler show for IDE devices. One of the larger issues with losing drives is corrupted IDE bridge chip drivers. No secondary IDE, or wrong secondary IDE and you can't see thru the chip to see the drives.
The cdrw power issue is something else.
Do you have any of the hardware identifying software available? Might help to find out what drivers you need.
You can find them by a google search:
"Aida32", "BelarcAdvisor", or "SysoftSandra".

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[mattjurado]

Please also report if you can even see them in device manager (if you don't, boot to safe mode, and if they are there in safe mode, remove them, when you reboot they will be reinstalled), or if there are any conflicts in device manager.

Matt J.

 

[visualuser]

This is weird. Now today both drives are showing up. Nothing in the device manager shows that things are not working correctly.

Correction: M and N were the cd rom drives. I assume the OS install was always on C, even befor the rebuild.

So I guess things are ok???

 

[visualuser]

Also, just noticed the light keeps coming on the cdrw and when I try to burn a disk, it says to put media in that the cd is not big enough and it's a blank cd.

I'm wondering if the cdrw is bad.

 

[edfair]

As things normally rebuild, your IDE stuff gets identified on one pass thru bootup, the drivers load, and on the next rebbot the CDs show up. So sometimes, depending on what is on the M/B you go thru 6 to 8 reboots before everything is working.
If the R/W wasn't failing before the reinstall you probably have something in the IDE that is still glitched.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[visualuser]

Hmmm, ok.

We normally don't buy crappy machines like this, especially one with ME. Someone ran down to the local office store and picked this one up, what a mistake!

Anyway, it was acting really strange once I finished rebuilding it. I just ran a debug before a format now and I'm doing it for the second time, that's it for this machine.

I'm not sure if the cdrw was messed up before. It was sent to me from another one of our businesses.

I reset all the cables and still it acted weird.

 

[edfair]

I haven't noticed any glitches with ME, but I didn't have it loaded down. But I've since upgraded to SE in what was the ME partition with a different M/B so no telling what it would have done.
My basic feeling was that ME was Se with about 300mb of frills that I didn't need.
I'm assuming that the debug you refer to is cleaning out the hard drive.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[visualuser]

This is what I mean by debug.

http://premiersupport.dell.com/us/en/kb/document.asp?nav=Knowledge_Base&DN=TT1011054&SvcTag=

 

[visualuser]

OOOps, link didn't work.


Performing the following steps will lead to the loss of all data on the hard drive. The purpose of this DEBUG script is to remove all formatting and partitioning information from your hard disk when FDISK is unable to do so. Please ensure that all necessary backups have been created prior to proceeding.


Run the Debug Script

The following debug script removes DOS and non-DOS partitions on the hard drive. This debug script allows you to convert a drive from an incompatible partition structure to one that will work with FDISK.EXE such as converting Linux partitions to MS-DOS partitions.


Insert the boot disk that contains the Debug command into the floppy disk drive.

Restart the computer.
A black screen with the Microsoft Windows® 95 Startup Menu appears.

Press the <5> key, and then press the <Enter> key.
The boot process concludes with an A:\> prompt followed by a blinking cursor (underline).

From the A:\> prompt, type the following commands, and then press the <Enter> key after each command:

NOTE: Type the bolded text only (the debug prompt is a dash). You may receive an error if you type anything other than the bold text. The non-bolded text represents the system response that will appear after typing each command and pressing the <Enter> key.
debug
-F 200 L1000 0
-A CS:100
xxxx:0100 MOV AX,301
xxxx:0103 MOV BX,200
xxxx:0106 MOV CX,1
xxxx:0109 MOV DX,80


NOTE: Type 80 for the primary hard drive - HD 0, or type 81 for the secondary hard drive - HD 1.
In most cases, the primary hard drive is required 80.


xxxx:010C INT 13
xxxx:010E INT 20
xxxx:0110 (Leave this line blank. Press the <Enter> key to continue.)
-G

The message Program terminated normally appears.



Press the power button to turn off your computer.

On the ensuing startup, the hard drive must be partitioned and formatted. Refer to the Additional Information section for further instructions.