Hey. My name is Emery, and I'm having a problem with my CD Rom drives. I have a Sony DRU-510A and an old Toshiba CR-RW (it's like 4 years old). The problem is that windows XP is telling me that my drivers are either missing or corrupted. I've only ever used the windows default drivers.

I've taken another CD Drive and plugged it in ... I get the same problems. I tried my drives in another computer, and they work fine, so I know it's not the drives.

I think I may have flipped a switch or something in the OS. Either that or I semi-fried my motherboard while playing with my hard drives.

The install is fairly brand-new. I was able to install several programs using my drives. I used to have win98, but I went out and bought a new drive and OS. I unhooked my old drive and made my computer nice.

Then I swapped hard drives, effectively going back to win98 so I could transfer my files (I burned them to CD using my burners). When it was clean, I did an FDISK on the entire drive, then switched back to XP, hooking up the old HD as a slave.

It was a few days after that that I noticed my CDs not working. They don't show up in my computer, and they do show up with yellow exclamations under device manager (drivers are either missing or corrupted).

I have tried uninstalling and removing the drivers, but they always come back as corrupted.

In win98 I would have extracted files from a cab. I imagine there's soemthing similar for XP, but I'm having a real hard time finding the file name on the web. Can someone help me? Or do I have to reinstall my OS. And if I do that, will it preserve my settings like 98 did?

Thanks
- Emery
ealan@ealan.us

Does your BIOS see the CD ROM drives on bootup? (Not all machines list all drives they see, but many Award bios' will show the CD-ROMS it detects as it does it's POST test).

Have you checked all the cables on the CD Drives? (I mean, check as in 'try another cable'). How are they hooked up? (Both on the secondary IDE cable? That would be best, since the two hard disks will run faster if they aren't sharing the primary with a CD-ROM). I'm assuming you've set the jumpers on them correctly, have you tried just installing one at a time, jumped to master?

If you have both CD Roms on the secondary, try jumping that second hard drive to Master, and move it to the secondary and pull both CD ROMS for a moment, to check if the secondary IDE port is working.

If all that checks out, you could go into Device Manager, and try to force upgrade your CD-ROM drivers to some other driver by picking your driver from a list, then let Windows search for better drivers, in hopes it'll replace those possibly corrupt drivers. Hope this gives you some help.

Yeah, the BIOS sees them. I haven't physically changed cables ... however, I did unhook my slave HD and replace it with my sony dvd drive (so IDE0 Master was winXP HD and IDE0 Slave was DVD drive), and completely unhooked my secondary IDE cable. I got the same problem ... drivers are corrupted or missing. Jumpers are (and were) set correctly now and during all tests.

I will try putting a master cd drive on the secondary slave position, but I'm not hopeful.

I would LOVE to replace drivers ... but how????? Where on the winXP CD are the cdrom drivers? I'll do another Google search this morning, and will keep my fingers crossed, but if anyone knows where they are or has the files handy, please let me know!

- Emery

(And yes, there's another computer here with a CD drive that works, so I can copy from CD to HD on computer 2 then transfer the files over the network.)

Okay. I had way better success this time. First of all, don't go to windrivers.com ... they charge for admittance. But on Siliconguide.com, they had this article/forum: http://www.siliconguide.com/qa/forum/messages/71.shtml
Basically, what it says is go to the following registry folder:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
SYSTEM
CurrentControlSet
Control
Class
{4D36E965-E325 -11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}
Then you'll see 2 items on the right: upperfilters and lowerfilters (actually, I only had lowerfilters ... it didn't seem to matter). Delete them (or it), uninstall your drives from the device manager, then reboot. They work!! Only somehow, my drive letters are rearragned ... my master is F and the slave is E. Oh well. At least they work!!!

Hope this helps anyone else out.
- Emery

You can change drive letters in Windows XP quite easily. (By the way, good to see you've gotten the drivers replaced, that must be quite a relief to you!).

To change your assigned drive letter:

Open Control Panel, pick Performance and Maintenance, pick Administrative Tools, pick Computer Management, and pick Storage, then Disk Management (local). You'll pull up the Disk Management tool, at the bottom right of it you will see your hard disks, and CD drives in a scrollable list. Pick your first CD drive, right click on it, and you'll see the option 'Change Drive Letter and Paths', pick that, highlight the drive in the box that pops up, and hit the Change button, and you'll get a box where you can change what letter it shows up as.

Repeat for other drive. And you're done.

Hope I've helped.