XP detects, but can't use optical drives??

[isildur]

I installed a lite-on dvd-rw in a machine running windows xp home and had both the dvd-rw and the other dvd-rom working fine - I used each to install the dvd burning software. Later, NEITHER of the optical drives are available in any apps or My Computer.
In the properties for each drive in the device manager it says windows has the drivers loaded but can't find the device. If I uninstall the drives there, windows immediately identifies the "new hardware" and correctly ID's each device - but I get the message about a problem during installation and the drives are still not usable.

I changed out the IDE cable, checked to make sure there were no master/slave conflicts, checked to make sure the bios screen detected both drives correctly (it did), and updated the VIA drivers just for kicks but I couldn't get XP to work with the drives again - even when I moved one of the drives to the slave position on the primary IDE channel.

So, windows detects the drives, but nothing I could think to do would get them to be USABLE.

<--- baffled

 

[Richard98]

By any chance did you install Nero InCd? I had similar problems until I uninstalled it.

 

[lobadobadingdong]

have you tried running it with just one optical drive plugged in at a time to see if it's a hardware fault of one of the drives on the chain?

 

[isildur]

I tried every drive/cable option there is - at every step all drives should up in the bios and in the windows device manager, but none of the settings allowed the optical drives to be usable, they always had the error message in the device manager.