Hi......both my CD drives dont work. I have a cd rom drive (D) and a cd rw drive (E). Neither of them read any type of disc, whether it be data, music, photos etc and i have tried these disc in another pc and they work fine. I am using OS windows xp. I have been down all the routes of device manager and it says everything is working. I have uninstalled the drives and then restarted my pc, and windows automatically detected them and installed them. I have also done a system restore and ran the troubleshooter. None of these helped. Please help me as I cannot even backup my pc. Thanks.

Did ur drives work b4, when did the problem start, did u install any new software or hadrives.

i faced a similar problem, firstly on the IDE cable. the first connector must go with the master cd drive, then the second connecter with the slave.

Also ensure the jumpers are set up correctly. However, since the drives are being detected in Windows, I don't think this is the problem.

Thanks for the reply....both of my drives worked before, and I havent added any more hardware or harddrives to my system. The only software I have installed is antivirus which are Avast and AVG. Which cables are the IDE cables, but I can not see how this can be a problem as I have not tampered with any internal cables, and all of my drives were previously working. The problem started about 2 weeks ago.

Im trying to get this right, you say they both arent working. My last ? is did they both stop reading cd's at the same time?

1 - Restart Your PC and try to boot from CD
If that works there is something wrong in ur windows installation try and re-install
ur drivers.

2 - If it does not boot from CD at all then there is something wrong with your ide
cable or port.

I can not boot from my cd drives. I tried both of them. How do i check to see if the ports are ok? Also I can not get my system restore to work as i tried to restore to an earlier time. Thanks for your time.

i suggest you get a new optical drive, bcoz i dont things ur 2 drives are working,

To check if ur IDE cable is working, put ur hardrive on that cable, and if it works then its definetly ur cd-drives that arent working

Thanks for your advice, i have just taken my drives apart and in my cd rw i found a paper clip (bloody kids) and now it works fine. The rom drive i just gave the lens a good vlean with some lint free cloth and that seems to be working fine now. Thank you again for your help.

good thing you thought of that, otherwise you would have wasted ur money