Windows Can't See CD-ROM or DVD-ROM Drives

[strauba]

All of a sudden Windows XP-Pro has stopped seeing the cd-rom and dvd-rom drives in my HP Pavillion desktop. When I go to device manager they show up with the yellow ! next to them. I have tried updating the drivers to no avail. I have tried uninstalling them and letting Windows find and re-install them. I get a message saying there was a problem with the installation and the devices might not work. They don't -- same status.

If it makes any difference, I don't see a service called CDROM running even though when I do a Net STart it says it's already started.

I have also tried to connect two different external (USB) CR-ROM drives and WIndows won't see thewm either.

This problem is not directly associated with any change in hardware or configuration that I made. All Windows critical updates have been applied.

Help!

 

[edfair]

Any problems show up on the IDE controllers.
This was a fairly common occurance with 98 when it lost the INTEL drivers on the bridge chip that wiped out the secondary channel so the opticals were never seen until the drivers for the chip were reloaded.

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

 

[cdogg]

1) What does the BIOS report? Are they showing up in there?

2) Make sure the IDE cable to either drive and the motherboard did not come loose.

3) Try a Win98SE boot disk and test the CD/DVD drives from a DOS prompt (only try to read a CD).

~cdogg
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Albert Einstein
[tab][navy]For general rules and guidelines to get better answers, click here:[/navy] faq219-2884

 

[strauba]

Thank you for your input. I got sent out of town for a couple of weeks so I'm late in following up. I did try/check everything suggested -- even came up with a new driver for the IDE, but nothing helped. This weekend I started a new search and landed at a Microsoft Support site that said the symptoms could be the result of an uninstall of CD writer software and could be resolved with a simple registry edit. While I did not uninstall the specific software mentioned the symptoms seemed to match so I tried it. It worked!! I once again have a function CD-ROM and DVD-ROM drive. Hee's the releveant url:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;270008

Thanks again for the help.