SO. . . my parents' computer has a cd burner drive and a dvd drive. . . yet they don't show up. It's like it doesn't know they are there. They pop in and out and the lights come on when I put stuff in them... but nothing past that. It only recognizes having an A drive and a C drive. What should I do?
have you installed any drivers? is this winxp or what? If you check in Control Panel>System>hardware?>device manager, is there anything there?
sorry, guess I should have been more specific. I think it's virus related, because they USED to be there. My parents are running this POS Gateway (ugh) with Win ME, and no they didn't show up last I checked in device manager.
I figured I'd ask first. If it is virus related, what can I do, anyways? Assuming I fix it, I still don't have the original disks for these drives (hell, I don't know if my parents ever got them)
Reminds me of some guy who needed drivers for his CD drive, be called technical support, and they mailed him the drivers. On a CD.
Anyway, did they suddenly stop working for apparently no reason, or because you did something?
IDE cables might also be the problem. They're either not in all the way or one pin is broken. Even without drivers your computer should recognize it.
Generally, if something like this happens to me, I just replug the IDE cables in and out from both the cd drives and from the mobo. I also doubt it has anything to do with a virus.
alright, I'll check it out. No, it's my parents' computer. I just came back from college and suddenly they're gone. It was weird.
edit: and thanks for the link, hig. I gotta spread it around or I'd rep you
who the hell did that? ^
AVG is also a good (free) anti-virus software. But this really doesn't sound virus related. Maybe some settings were changed internally. You may also want to try a system restore and see if that does it. It's at least worth a shot if nothing else works. Are the drives even listed in the Device Manager under System Properties?
If you go to Control Panel>System>Hardware>Device Manager and expand the 'DVD/CD-ROM drives' item,is there anything there? If so, does it have a question mark on the icon, or is it called something like "Unknown device"? If so, right click on it, select uninstall, find the drivers for the drives on the internet, and then click the toolbar icon with a magnifying glass over a computer.
(This is all Windows XP by the way, it might be a little bit different on your computer)
If that doens't work, then just wait until Trigger posts in the thread, that always works.
If you ever check the Device Manager list and notice that your optical drives are listed but have an error, check their properties and take not of the error code provided. The first three that come to mind, which you may see in this situation is probably:
The device is not working properly because Windows cannot load the drivers required for this device (Code 31).
Your registry might be corrupted. (Code 19)
Windows successfully loaded the device driver for this hardware but cannot find the hardware device. (Code 41)
You can try downloading [URL="http://aumha.org/downloads/cdgone.zip"]this .zip file[/URL] and run either cdgone.reg or Editreg.reg - they are both the same, the EditReg file is just for those who are a little scared about using the "merge into registery" automatically. It allows them to check what the registry entry actually is, before they allow it to merge. Hopefully that should solve your problems and if it doesn't, you know what to do next...
Find the cdrom.sys file and rename it to cdromx.sys. Shut down your PC and start it up again. Windows won't be able to find the system file and should create a new one to replace it, and bam - CD drives work again. That's what happened with mine when I had the exact same problem.
If it doesn't fix it, then delete the new cdrom.sys and rename cdromx.sys back to cdrom.sys and it's as if you never altered anything.
it turns out one of the cd rom drives had just shut down, and it somehow caused the other one to stop working as well (master drive?). We found this out when a friend tried to fix it.
Kind of the point of checking the IDE cables, that KoH suggested, seeing as you have them sharing IDE channels and all...
well F*** me for not knowing what I was doing. I checked the IDE cables, switched them around, and nothing worked, so I figured I'd get someone who knew what they were doing to look at it. That's the extent of my knowledge of computer hardware. So I took it to get it fixed. Don't start.
Why not do that to begin with then?
I did, right after I read the suggestions on here. I saw two IDE cables hanging down, not attached to anything, and I thought that was the problem, so I spent twenty minutes trying to figure out where they go. When I couldn't find anything, I took it to someone to get it fixed. Turned out they didn't go anywhere. Never overestimate how little I know about computers.
Did you try my idea?
nah, by the time you'd posted it I'd dropped it off.
(sigh) Remember where I said "don't start"? I didn't mess with anything. He said to check to see if the cables were all plugged in. I checked. Yep, plugged into both cdroms and going into the motherboard and the power supply. At least that's the best I could figure. There was no harm in that. I realized that there wasn't anything unplugged, so it must be something else. So then I took it to get it fixed. Beforehand, I figured it might be a software problem, like maybe something was missing. Additionally, my old roommate told me something like this happened to him when his computer had caught a virus. Why don't you go to everybody else who posts a problem here in the technology boards and tell them to just go get it fixed and quit wasting time making threads? Jesus, woman, leave me alone.
Oh, quit crying.
rot in hell you uppity concentration camp survivor looking twat
(that was my original response before I edited it :) )
Wait... I'm confused... Why didn't you just take it in to begin with?
Btw, easier way to get to device manager.
Right click on 'My Computer' > Properties > Hardware > Device Manager
SUPER DUPER!!!
Even easier way to get to Device Manager: Right-click on My Computer > Manage > Device Manager.
The things you learn!
HAHHAHA UR FUNNY
gtfo Nah, I love ya. Toss mah salad?
k shure but be warned, I'm a... *scrolls up*... "uppity concentration camp survivor looking twat."
It's okay, I like twat.