DVD/CDRW driver don't read any CD or DVD

[Juan Carlos Donoso]

Greetings,

A few days ago my drive was working good, but today nnow
it doesn't recognize any cd in the drive, nor the autorun
works. Any ideas? I have a three IDE devices
coonfiguration install on my machine... The primary HDD
is connected as a Master Primary Disk and the DVD/CDRW
unit as a slave in the same IDE channel, the second hard
disk is set as a secondary master disk.

Best regards,

-Juan Carlos

 

[Guest]

I believe there is a bug or virus going around that will
disable any optical device you have on your system. The
only way to fix this is a full reinstall of Windows XP.
Try the repair as in dont do a format, but bypass that
and it will reinstall all the Windows XP system files
that contain the optical drive drivers.

 

[Steve Robertson]

Juan Carlos,

I've always heard not to mix CDs and hard disks on the same IDE cable.
Different generations of hard disk are troublesome enough to get working on
the master/slave issue without adding the different seek times between a CD
and a hard disk. Try to get the 2 hard disks onto the same cable, being
careful that the one with the boot files continues to be the master on
channel 1. If changing channels causes the partition containing the
operating system to receive a new letter (from C: to D:, for instance) then
you will have an unbootable mess. You need to think like an IDE controller
in order to predict what letter will apply to what.

It can be helpful to boot to the Recovery Console (an NTFS-compliant form of
DOS) in order to have a look around before you try booting XP for the first
time with the new cable arrangement. It contains a Map command which can be
used to view how the drive letters will fall. If the partition containing XP
changes letters then you need to be prepared to do something different. For
instance - buy a new IDE board so you have more channels to play with.

Good luck,
Steve