CD/DVD drive problems

We have a 10-year old Dell desktop with _NEC CD-RW NR-9300A and LITEON DVD-ROM LTD163 factory installed. There is also an ASUS SDRW-08D1S-U external attached.

When the hard drive became full - did I mention it's 10 years old? - we removed a bunch of programs that we do not use. When I went in to check on the hardware, the DVD/CD-ROM drives all had exclamation points. I uninstalled them and let XP reinstall them, and then checked on the drivers.

Now My Computer recognizes all 3 of them, to the point that it will eject and the icon changes when you insert a CD, but on the CD-RW, it will open a window, but shows blank. The other two don't recognize that there is a CD in there at all. Also strange, if you boot with a CD in the CD-RW, it will read it, but only that particular CD. This does not work on the other two.

I have tried the Microsoft Fixit, but that did not work either. Any suggestions are welcome.

Thanks,

Margot

 

Unfortunately, my husband neglected to tell me that one of the error messages he received when he was told that the disk was full was that system restore had been disabled due to lack of space. I know I should have checked before deleting anything, but by the time I thought of that route, there was nothing I could do. I did manage to get that running again, but it won't help us with this problem.