Posted: 5/17/2006 10:11:35 AM EDT
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The CD/DVD drive on my notebook computer has stopped working. I am told that the hardware is usually very reliable. When I bring up My computer>view system information>hardware>device manager>DVD/CD-ROM drives> the drive installed in my computer it says: Windows cannot load the device driver for this hardware. The driver may be corrupted or missing. (Code 39) My understanding is that the drive is a "plug and play" drive, and that the driver software is built into Windows XP. Will I have to reinstall Windows XP? If so, to reinstall Windows XP will I need: An external hard drive to back up files An external CD drive to use the Windows XP reinstall CD? Thanks all |
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Have you uninstalled any software lately? Try an older fix outlined here: support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;314060 |
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Laptop optical drives have a fairly high rate of failure; I'd guess that the drive is probably dead. You *can* try putting in a bootable CD to see if the drive works at all. If it does, than you will probably need to run a repair on Windows. NOTE: Copy everything out of your "Documents and Settings" directory into another directory, because Windows Setup will wipe it out if you reinstall/repair. It warns you of this, but most folks don't read/understand the warning until it's too late and their files are gone. -Troy |
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I say, look online and make sure you have the most recent driver for your device. What happened is you most likely uninstalled a program tied into the functionality of your driver or it was simply corrupted. You could always uninstall the drive from device manager and let windows append its own driver, but that could pose a problem. I say search and find the latest driver. You should not have to reinstall windows to take care of a hardware problem, or even do a windows repair. At least I do not recommend it. Also it depends on how the drive has stopped working. If it stops reading disks, clean it and see what happens, depending on how old it is the lens' can accumulate dust and junk. If it doesn’t open you have a bad motor (I have had that one happen) and then you have a nice cd/dvd rom paper weight. Hope this helps |
Well, I got the drive working... There was nothing wrong with the drive itself. I googled the entire error message, and there was a fix from pcworld. Apparently if you delete some music/recording programs, it screws up the registry and the drive won't work anymore. I had deleted RecordNow Deluxe, and I suspect that my problem started there |