My sister's CDRW Drives keep disappearing. (1 Viewer)

[Mitch Stevens]

Hi Everyone,

Can anyone please help me? About a month ago, my sister told me that just as she was about to burn a CD, Nero told her that she did not have a CDRW installed. She told me to check her computer, and sure enough, when you open up "My Computer" (in XP) her HP CDRW is no longer there. So, we went and bought a new CDRW drive (different brand). When we installed in (in addition to the other one, and not actually replacing it) Windows did not recognize the new drive either.

When we went into the "Device Manager" it listed both CDRW drives, but when you click on the properties of each, it says that the Windows registry might be corrupted.

So, I reformatted her computer and installed XP again. Both drives were working fine for a week, but just today she told me that her CDRW drives were missing again. Again, windows says the exact same thing as before that the registry might be corrupted. We "uninstalled" the drives from device manager, and restarted. Windows seemed to find them again as it booted up, but it still won't list them in "My Computer" because clicking on the properties (in Device Manager) still claims that Windows registry might be corrupted.

Any ideas? I really do not want to format her computer EVERY time that her CDRW drives disappear.

 

[Max Leung]

Is the CDRW on an IDE cable separate from the main hard drive?

You could have a cable problem if the CDRW is sharing the same IDE cable as another drive. Try to ensure that the CDRW is on its own cable, by itself.

 

[Diallo B]

I just had a similar problem when installing a cd-rw on a friends computer. After a few hours of troubleshooting I replaced the IDE cable and lo and behold everything was working fine and both drives were recognized.

I agree with Max's recommedation about the cable.

djb

 

[Mitch Stevens]

More info:

My sister has TWO hard drives that she absolutely refuses to give up. Both hard drives were set from the factory to "master" and they didn't come with instruction booklets to change them to slaves. Therefore, in order to have both hard drives at one time, I had to put them on seperate IDE cables both set to master.

Both CDRW drives are slaves to the hard drives on seperate IDE cables.

Like I said before, they were both working fine (when I formatted and reinstalled XP) but now they are suddenly not showing up in Windows XP (My Computer)....there are no drives listed.

AS for changing the IDE cables to newer ones, I have tried that (I have like 20 IDE cables lying around) and none of them are making any difference now that Windows in no longer listing them in "My Computer."

 

[Diallo B]

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.............. I see......

I would do my best to find the jumper settings for the hard drives and put the hard drives on 1 IDE channel and the cd-rw's on the other one.

I am pretty sure that the hard drives should have the manufacturer of the drive listed on it somewhere.
Find out who it is and then find the jumper settings for that particular mfr. They are usually the same for all of the drives for a particular mfr.

Then you know what to do.

As to why the drives keep disappearing, especially after you reformat, I have absolutely no idea.

Hope this helps.

djb

 

[Shiva Singh]

I had a similar problem once. Try the CD-RW on an IDE channel by itself.

The CD-RW would work by itself, but not with the other device (a dvd drive) connected to the same ide channel. Swapped cables, hard drives and disc drives with same results.

It turns out the other dvd drive was defective and would not allow the cd-rw to work in DMA mode. Win XP would simply ignore the cd-rw if it could not enable DMA mode. Replacing that drive corrected the problem permanently.

 

[Arthur Legardo]

What kind of CDRW drive is it? I know that my Plextor 12/10/32 CDRW refused to work properly (kept on disappearing from Explorer) when it was set to slave. My latest drive, a Yamaha F1, doesn't care.