Hello everyone. I was wondering if anyone could help me with my problem. I have two CD-ROMs on my PC (one regular and another rewritable). Recently, for some reason, my computer stopped recognizing them. When I put CDs in CD-ROMs - nothing happens. When I checked under Window Explorer - D and F drives are not even there. They used to be but not anymore

I am lost. I am not sure how to fix it. I thought maybe if I download appropriate drives for these CD-ROMs, I would fix it but the problem is that these CD-ROMs don't have company's names on them.. So which drive do I download?

Can anyone help me with this? I would greatly appreciate anyone's assistance.
Sincerely,
Irina

You'll probably have to pull the side panel off the tower and pull out the cd drive to see who manufactered it...You'll find the instructions at the www.microsoft.com\ support site, just use the search option to "remove the cd drive, desktop pc"....Follow the instructions to the letter, a spark will kill your motherboard....Print out the instructions, then remember to unplug the pc and drain the motherboard of residue electricity before attempting to take it apart....

Windows os's 95 thru XP do not care what brand or model drives you have. Support is provided natively by these os's regardless of what brand or model they happen to be. This applies to all ide & scsi drives that are internal. External drives may require port drivers depending on how they connect to the pc however the actual drive in external models will have the same ide or scsi interface so again all ide & scsi drives are supported natively by Windows os.
When an ide drive is connected properly, jumpered correctly, and connected to the secondary ide port, Windows will detect it automatically during bootup.

Assuming your drives are both connected to the secondary ide port, one jumpered as Master, the other as Slave, port is enabled and shown to be working in Device Manager, then both should be detected and listed under CD-ROM in Device Manager. If not, then you have another problem that must be addressed first.

Do not install any driver you think might be a driver... it IS NOT a Windows driver. The only drivers that exist are for DOS. If these are installed on a pc running Windows, you will have dos compatibility problems and a sluggish running pc. Check the autoexec.bat and config.sys files (using sysedit) for any references to files containing the words:
mscdex.exe /d: mscd001 (or similiar)
device=xxxx.sys /d: mscd001(or similiar
If these command lines exist, remove or disable them and save the files.
To disable the command lines, simply type REM and a space in front of the existing command lines.

If you are running Windows XP (and have installed/uninstalled any recording software like Easy Cd Creator or other recording software) please read and follow the instructions Microsoft provides for removing the upper & lower filters in the registry:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q314060
Once these filters are removed, just reboot the machine and the drives should be detected.

Remember all a cd-rom or cd-rw drive needs is the native support Windows provides automatically. This support includes READ only support in Windows os's. XP offers builtin recording support. For cd-rw or cd-r drives you will need optional recording software if using Windows 9x, ME, or 2000. You may also use any quality recording software in Windows XP as long as it's a compatible version. However, remember also to only install ONE recording software. Using multiple recording softwares will usually result in problems.

It is also suggested that you read some of the hundreds of requests/comments in our CD-RW DRIVER REQUEST section as well as our CD-RW Help Guide: :)

http://www.driverguide.com/guide2/cdrw-help.htm