DVD drive not recognized - damaged or missing driver

[Les LaZar]

Greetings all:

I have a strange one. System is XP Home running on a P4/2.4GHz with a
DVD+RW drive as the Master on the second IDE channel. The system is about 6
months old.

Symptoms:

Recently it started to boot up with the following message in a window
overlaying the desktop: "directcd.exe - Application error. The application
failed to initialize properly (0x0000142). Click on OK to terminate the
application." Clicking on OK removed the message window and the system
appears to operate normally except the DVD+RW drive is not available.

The drive does not show up in the My Computer window. In Device Manager,
the drive is present with an exclaimation mark. When opening Properties for
for that drive, the status message is: "Windows cannot load the driver for
this hardware. The driver may be corrupted or missing (Code 39). The
on-line troubleshooter suggests uninstalling the device and rebooting. This
has no effect.

I went into the knowledge base and found article 315241 which describes a
similar (but not identical) problem. It recommends replacing the associated
driver and .dll files. Howver, it is not specific about which files those
are. I examined the Driver Details list for the balky drive and found the
following files listed there:

cdrom.sys, imapi.sys, pwd_2k.sys, redbook.sys (all in
windows\system32\drivers\) and storprop.dll (in windows\system32\). I
located all of these files (except pwd_2k.sys) on a known good system and
copied them to the problem system. No effect.

I believe that the problem is a missing or corrupted file in the Win XP
system because the suspect drive (and associated motherboard) work just fine
if the system is booted from the WinXP CD-ROM. (The suspect drive also
works OK in a different system and a known good CD-ROM drive fails the same
way in the suspect system.

While it is likely I could cure the problem by re-installing WinXP, I would
rather avoid that drastic measure since it would also require the
re-installation of all the application software (the data is well backed
up). I am looking at the better part of a day's work to re-install
everything when the problem is probably only one corrupt file.

I am stumped. Can anyone suggest other files to replace that would enable
the drive to work, just as a plain DVD-ROM drive that WinXP recognizes out
of the box. Once that is working, then I can re-install the specific files
that came with the drive to enable the DVD+RW functions.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Les

 

[Cypher]

Les,

* Find out the manufacture's name and model of the DVD-RW drive. This is
listed physically on the drive. If it not listed on the front of the drive
you may have to remove the drive to get the name.
* Do a search for the manufacture in Google or search engine of your choice.
At the site, do a search on the site for "model of DVD+RW" and "drivers" and
"XP". Or a search similar to that. You should get some kind a link to
download the drivers for the drive.
* Remove the drive in device manager.
* Install the new driver for the drive.

This may work for you. Post the drive manufacture and model if you need help
finding the drivers for you DVD+RW drive.

 

[Les LaZar]

Cypher,

Thanks for the tip. The drive describes itself as a TDK DVDRW420N in Device
Manager. I will do a Google search on that and see what comes up.

Les

 

[Les LaZar]

Cypher,

Well, the Google search was unsuccessful. While there is a firmware upgrade
for this drive (also known as the indi DVD 2x or 2.4+R), there is no
specific driver. It uses the generic winXP CD-ROM/RW/DVD driver set. There
are some additional utilities and applications supplied with the drive, but
no unique driver.

So I am back to the problem of identifying the standard winXP files that are
used to access this drive.

Any advice....please!

Thanks,

Les