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General discussion

Both CD drives not recongized

Oct 28, 2004 8:35PM PDT

HELP... I am running Win. XP and both CD drives are no longer accesable. Have tried restore, unplugging cable to drives, deleting drives under device manager and reinstalling, unplugging cables from drives and redoing uninstall, put different Cd drive in that came from working system. None of these has helped. Power is to both drives and doors open and close. Don't know what else to do and system did not have a restore disk provided when purchased. Is my only solution formatting and buying new windows platform? All updates from Microsoft have been maintianed and SP2 was added. Adaware and Norton are run on this machine. Thanks for all anticipated suggestions. Best regards, Del R.

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Re: Both CD drives not recongized
Oct 31, 2004 9:56AM PST

hi dude

Well once my hard disk and cd were not working. The problem was the cable. Are both cd conncted trhu the same cable? if so try changing the cable or switch one of the cdroms to the cable connecting the harddisk. see if it works.

if that doesn't help try switching the cable's position on the motherboard.

One last suggestion, change the jumpers on the cd-roms and see if it works.

That;'s all i can offer.
eyemid

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Re: Both CD drives not recongized
Oct 31, 2004 10:35PM PST

Del,

It's a bit unclear what initiated your problem: Did the problem start when you upgraded to SP2 or was it during some hardware modification?

I had a similar problem a couple months ago when I removed a CD R/W drive from my XP system. That turned out to be a jumper configuration problem. There should be 3 jumpers on the back of each CD drive. One is for IDE master, the second for IDE slave, and the 3rd is "Cable Select", meaning the position of the drive on the cable determines whether it's master or slave. If you have 2 drives and both are trying to be either master or slave, you'll have this kind of problem.

Does your power on self-test recognize either or both of your drives? If not, the previous answer about trying a different cable may be the solution.

Unfortunately, you may have made the problem worse by trying to uninstall XP device drivers when you don't have a system restore disk. You may be able to borrow an XP CD from a friend to reload the CDROM drivers. You might also be able to download XP drivers from the CDROM manufacturer's website.

Hope this helps. Regards, Bill V

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Re: Both CD drives not recongized
Nov 1, 2004 12:30AM PST

Hi Bill.. Thanks for your reply. A am trying to get a friends computer running better. He originally had a worm many months ago which he removed with a micorsoft remove tool he claimed. I am not sure on that but I ? that. When I picked up his machine I went to install my ISP provider as I use a phone line and he uses a cable modem discovered he had no CD drive access. He states it was working last time he tried them many days maybe even a few weeks before. I figured the restore command might bring them back.. Went to device managers and saw the yellow exclamation and that was when I decided restore was safest choice without a restore CD.. Don't know why "Circus" City didn't give him one with his HP system. That didn't work to a known good working date so then tried to get windows to do a fresh install on them even swapping out the physical drive and putting in one from my working system. Both of these CD drives were working fine when I installed 2nd drive. I will look harder at the jumpers but I have tried only one at a time to get something working again and suspect the drivers are corrupted. The system rund very sluggish. Over 4 minutes to boot to give you an idea. 3 minutes to wake up from hibernate. Which shows how messed up it is. If I knew which files need to stay active in the startup sequence I would shut everything else off and see if that would have helped the running and boot up times. He has ordered a replacement resotre CD from HP but it may not arrive in time before they leave for they leave for the sunbelt this winter. I appreciate your suggestions and have tried a different cable that was pulled from my working system. I am always trying to use what are good know hardware items to know that it sin't a hardware issue.. Sorry so long but I wanted to get all the facts acrossed and an IT I'm not but sometimes wish I was... grin... I think.. Thanks again.. Del