cd and dvd rom problems

Hi,
I recently reformatted and reinstalled win2k on a friends machine. All was fine when I gave it back to him, but now he has a problem with both his cd and dvd rom.
they're not reconised by windows, and show up in device manager as drivers not installed.
I had a similar problem with the hard drives on my p.c. a while ago
and managed to fix it by pointing them to the correct .inf files
but this hasn't worked on this machine.
I'm sure there must already be a post on this, but after extensive searching, i can't find it ; (
any ideas?

thanks in advance. Chris

 

Have you loaded the main board's drivers?

If so, have you checked the manufacturer's site to see if there is a BIOS or board driver update?

 

I have loaded up the mother board's drivers, but I can't see it hurting to reinstall them or check for an update ; )
I'll pop round there later and try

chris

 

Spotta,

I take it the CDROMS are being detected during the POST? (power on self test)

you might want to check the proper jumper settings for both drives... and the settings in the bios itself..

and of course that both ribbon cables are securely installed, possible they could have squeezed out during transit

cheers,
Ian.

 

Hi,
yep both drives are configured fine, the jumper settings are correct and leads are fine, they worked fine when the machine was here, and fine after I dropped it off for a day,
I've booted up from his Win2k disc to use the repair console, and that worked fine, so it's just windows that thinks these drives need drivers.
I do remember having a similar problem with my hard drives a while ago, all of a sudden windows (also 2k) wouldn't see them and in device manager it said 'the drivers for this device are not installed' and if I remember rightly I had to steer windows to the disk.inf file before it would reconise them again, this happened to 3 of my hard drives over a about a week, but has never happened again
I tried directing my mates windows to the cdrom.inf and dvd.inf as I figured this might do the trick, but no luck
My mate's p*ssed off that he can't use the drives, so has asked me to wipe it and start again tomorrow but I really would like to get to the bottom of this
Thanks for all the help so far, but in 24 hrs i'm wiping it and starting again!!!
any help in the next 24 hrs would still be most appreciated though

chris

 

hmmm this is way off...

but you could try disconnecting the slave and see if that lets the other one show up...

I know it sounds strange, but I know someone that for the life of them couldn't get both drives to work in 2k together, only the one or the other.... I believe they worked fine previously together although he's not sure when or why they started refusing to..

again (like so many things) he updated to xp and everything was well...

strange phenomena lol

 

I have seen machines on which neither of two CD-ROM drives are recognized properly. This is on a machine that has run fine for many months, or even years. Frequently, on machines like this, I find that the drives are set to cable-select as opposed to master and slave. I set them to master and slave and the problem is solved.

You might also try a virus scan.