OK I know there is a forum dedicated to dvd roms but not one for cd rw as well (or I probably missed it, apologies :)
Anyway I was having difficulties with my drives reading and writing on both and so I changed the Dual Channel IDE cable for a brand new one this seemed to fix it. However, the next time I switched on my pc my drives were nowhere to be seen.
In device manager it advises me Windows has installed the device driver for this hardware but cannot see the device, yet it is in device manager and in bios when booting, am I going mad and missing something completely, please help before I throw the damn thing out of the window.
Thanks in advance
Pentium celeron 1ghz 256mb SDRam 32mb Nvidia 2 Graphics (lame I know but kids bleed me dry)
Try this, start/right click my computer/manage/disk mangement. Scroll down drive list, your drive should be there (esp, as it is in device manager & BIOS). You will have to assign a drive letter to each drive that is not in "Healthy" status!
I tried that and it finds them installs the drivers and then says Windows has installed the Drivers for this device but cannot see the hardware device.
disconnect 1 drive at a time by removing data cable to see if 1 drive is causing the problem. how many ide drives do you have besides the 2 rom drives & hd??
I would uninstall the Secondary IDE Controller, turn the PC off.
Disconnect both devices.
Reboot, let Windows settle.
Turn off PC.
Connect the DVD Rom (configure it as slave) to the Primary and reboot.
Let Windows go through the motions and see if it appears ok.
Then, attach the CDRW (configure as master) to the secondary and reboot.
Let Windows go through the motions and see if it appears ok.
BTW:Make sure the IDE/PSU cable is connected correctly, no bent pins etc......
Whether this is related or not I'm not sure, but a while back I had a problem of one of my disk drives radomly disappearing (but not the other), and reappearing. The problem was cured by changing from UDMA mode to PIO mode, or vice versa. This changed needed to occur every time the drive disappeared.
I eventually traced the problem to the StarForce copy protection system used in a number of games. Whether or not anyone here is familiar with it, it uninstalls the ASPI data for your system and replaces it with a different version to forcibly recognise a copied cd. Games that use starforce (such as doom 3, trackmania sunrise) can on occasions cause problems like this.
I eventually took the strategy of putting a new copy of windows on a different hard disk, for unrelated reasons, which bviously solved it, and when i reinstalled the game, the problem did not return. If ayone else experienced this, let me know.
