Posted: 7/27/2005 2:45:13 PM EDT
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Okay computer whizzes, a little help, please! About a week ago, my CD-RW quit working. No big deal, I thought; I'll get to it when I get a moment--like now. What I've discovered is that my CD-ROM also doesn't function. Oh, the door opens when I press the button, but when the CD slides in there, nothing happens so something isn't right. When I go to My Computer, the icons for both drives are nowhere to be found, and I could swear they used to be there. (BTW, I'm running Windows XP Home on a Dell desktop system that's about three years old.) I checked inside about an hour or so ago, and all the cables and stuff seem to be plugged in snugly. So, what is my next course of action (short of getting a new one, yeah, yeah)?  TIA.
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Max_Mike: Could be the IDE controller board, but isn't that built-in to the mother/system board? Do you have a spare disk drive that works, if so plug it in and see what happens. If it see this drive then you know your 2 old drives are bad, otherwise it's the IDE board. |
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did u uninstall any cd recording software lately..... roxio ez cd creator maybe if you have a bad cdrom drive sometimes it will cancel out both drives.. TURN THE COMPUTER OFF. unplug one drive start the system up and see if it is im my computer. if not do the same. |
Is there an easy way to test the boards before I go out and get a new CD-RW? And if I do just go ahead and get a new CD-RW and it still doesn't work, would that definitely indicate a new board is required? If so, which one: IDE, mother/system? |
I was at Fry's Electronics, in the City of Industry Calif, do you have one near you? They have a small electonics bench out front with some stuff maybe you can see if they have a working CD drive and plug it into your unit? |
You can check by putting one of the CD drives on the other controller. Most motherboards have 2 IDE controllers, a primary and a secondary. Assuming both CD drives are on the secondary and the boot hard drive is the master drive on the primary you could take one of the CD drives and make it a slave to the boot hard drive. Make sure all drive jumpers are set correctly for master and slave. If you do this and the CD drive shows up your problem probably was either a bad IDE cable or a problem with the secondary IDE controller. |
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What, you waited 9 minutes before posting that? Sorry to waste so much of your valuable time. If it's an ATAPI CD/ROM, it can become disabled in the BIOS. Try enabling primary and secondary IDE. Look for something that looks like HDD IDE. Try setting it to bothauto detect and enabled, then see if windows detects the drive after boot. |
the only ide cables that ive ever seen to bad. our my virus scanning machines. because i hook several hd's a day up to those cables. eventually from all the yanking of the cable it pulls the black connector so far apart it doesn't make a good connection. and doesn't find the HD. or is says the dreaded (this disk is not formatted would you like to format it now) 
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Roxio on XP is notorious for fucking up the registry and disabling drives After doing Sony tech support for a few years and encountering this exact same problem multiple times a week I'm betting on a software problem here. Right click on my computer and select properties, then the hardware tab, then the device manager button, then cd/dvd drives. Do they have red Xs or yellow exclamation points next to them? Double click them, what does it say in device status? |
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support.microsoft.com/kb/q270008/ Seriously, try this before you start wasting money on new hardware. |
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I was gonna suggest the roxiozap utility. click this link and type roxiozap(under knowledge base) and youll see what im talkin bout link 
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I did install Roxio's Media Creator 7 a while ago, but it never did seem to work so I just kept on using the old Adaptec Easy CD Creator that was bundled with the Philips CD-RW. (It would sometimes not work correctly, BTW.) I have not uninstalled either. (I tried to uninstall the Adaptec but would only get the install wizard for Efax, another program I've got but had no trouble with.) As for right-clicking on My Computer, when doing that, it's all fine until I read the list in Device Manager. There is nothing there that says CD/DVD drives and, thus, no red Xs or yellow exclamation points. So, I remain stumped.  But thanks for the tips, all! I appreciate all suggestions.
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Hey ! This worked for me ! Thanks Dude  My cd and dvd stopped showing up a few weeks ago. I hadn't loaded any new software lately and nothing I could do with drivers or cables was working, so I was about to do some hardware shopping. Saved me some $$  |