Computer 'forgets' about CD drive - hardware or software issue? (long)

Factual Questions
1

My apologies if this has been covered previously - I searched thread topics for a year past and did not find it.

My computer has forgotten that it has a CD drive and a DVD drive installed. This was not prompted by the installation of any other device - it just suddenly refused to load the device drivers. I’m trying to figure out if this is a Windows problem, a bad-spot-on-the-hard-drive problem, or what.

Saturday the computer began acting wonky. I was in Quicken and it suddenly began popping up the message “online setup is not installed - reinstall software”. This was a mere annoyance at the time, but prompted me to run Scandisk.

Scandisk found some lost chains & orphan files, and cleaned them up. The next thing I knew, on Sunday, the computer had forgotten how to talk to my digital camera. So, I reinstalled the camera software (figured some dll or cab file had been one of the orphans or lost chains from the day before). Ok, that went alright.

Monday I put a document in my HP all-in-one to scan, and the computer had forgotten all about the HP. This is where it gets strange. I could not get the computer to reinstall the HP software. On that day, I could not find the install CD for the HP, so I had downloaded the software from HP. It would not find the device. I tried about 5 times and finally gave up.

Tuesday I found the install CD, put it in the CD drive and … hmm. No CD drive in Explorer. I go to Control Panel and the hardware manager says this: “Windows cannot load the device driver for this hardware. The driver may be corrupt or missing (Code 39).”

Today, I finally get the CD drive to work (sometimes) by editing the registry to delete the Upperfilters and Lowerfilters for CD drives. Here’s the weirdness: the computer sees the CD drive but won’t read a CD until I go into Hardware and turn the volume up and down - kind of like waking the thing up. I must do this every time I change CDs in the drive.

The computer will not reboot in any mode except “last known good”, or off of a DOS diskette. Not safe mode. It’s BSOD every time. I want to run chkdsk but it won’t do that either.

Sorry for the length of this OP but here’s my question:
Does this sound like bad sectors on the HD where these drivers reside? Do I need to quit monkeying around with this HD, just go get another one and reload Windows? Or, does this sound like some other hardware problem (IDE controller??)

Thanks in advance ~

System: Dell 8300 - Pentium 4, 3 GHz - 1 GB RAM - Sony CD - Phillips DVD

2

What OS are you running?

3

Maybe your HD is going bad.

4

Did you uninstall/reinstall any CD/DVD authoring programs or do a “system restore”? (don’t do system restore, btw)

5

Flander Oops, sorry, Windows XP Professional, Service Pack 2. I wanted to install the Recovery Console, but my XP install CD is older than Service Pack 2 - there is a work-around to this issue but I don’t know if the time investment is worth it.
Also; I didn’t install/reinstall any software or hardware before this occured. About 3 weeks ago I set up a USB external hard drive and it runs every night doing backup. That’s the newest thing.

robcaro That’s what I’m trying to discern.

6

Is the CD drive detected happily and correctly by the BIOS ?

7

The behavior doesn’t sound as if the HD is cheesing, just that there’s a problem with the OS. If you were so inclined, you could do a fresh install of XP, but I’d do that as a last resort.

Find the model of your cd drive, go the manufacturer’s website and download the latest drivers. Delete the cd drive from devise manager, scan for hardware changes, then reinstall the drive using the updated drivers. Let us know if you need help with these steps.

8

essell It had a problem for a spell (calling it Unknown Device) but I cleaned the inside of the box and re-seated the IDE cables and power connections - that helped. Also, I hooked back up only the CD drive and not the DVD drive (yet).

Flander alright, I will attempt this next (find Sony driver and try to install). One issue I had yesterday, in trying to delete the device and re-install it, was that the device kept showing back up in the Hardware list even though I had uninstalled it earlier. It will be about 3 hours before I can do this. Thanks!

9

My suggestion would be to make sure that you’ve backed up all important files from your hard drive. Then you can safely try to diagnose whether you have a hard drive, OS, CD, loose cable, or some other problem. The fact that your computer cannot do a normal bootup says that you should at least suspect the hard drive. That was my problem and I just replaced the drive and all was fine.

10

Windows will do that. It will automatically scan for new hardware changes, find the CD drive and attempt to install it without you having to do much work. The point is to tell it to install with the new drivers, not the old (possibly corrupt) driver. Hope it helps.

11

nivlac I have everything backed up - all the important engineering data and drawing files anyway.

Went looking for drivers - and came up empty handed. Evidently the Sony is too old to still have drivers on the Sony site; the DVD came from Best Buy - there is no driver for it - as the installation guide says “Windows will automatically detect and install the necessary drivers”. Riiiiiiiight. I found a Self Test utility for it on the Dell site; I’m fixing to run that now. I could not find any drivers for it on the Dell site.

12

If you are consistently having problems with detecting drives like CD and hard drives, two things.

Try swapping out IDE cables,

If that does not help look for motherboard chipset drivers from manufacturers website and reload.

If that does not work, you probably have a drive controller on the way out and will need a new motherboard.

13

This procedure worked for one drive (the Sony CD-RW), using the old drivers. The Phillips DVD (Best Buy) has to be fiddled with in Device Manager each time I want to use it, but I think I can live with that. Thanks for the tip, Flander.

Drachillix, Isn’t your shop open yet ?!?! :taps foot impatiently:

I’ll dig through some boxes here and see if I’ve got another IDE cable. Also, I’ve downloaded and installed the updated chipset from Dell this am. The Phillips drive is still not right (“please insert a disk in Drive G” even though there’s one in it). Dell has an updated BIOS on their site, but it’s not much newer than the BIOS I’m running (10/04 vs 9/03). I’m a bit leery of trying to update BIOS - do you think it’s advisable in this case? Also: how difficult is it for a moderately computer-savvy person to install a motherboard (would it be easier to get a new box with motherboard only and install all my good stuff in it)?

For general information: I uninstalled AoHell completely from the machine and the BSOD went away. I thought that was noteworthy.

For anyone else having diagnostic issues, Nanoda had a good suggestion from this thread:

I plan to tackle that soon - I’ve got to catch back up on missed work, now.

Thanks for all the help ~

14

More news - now the USB ports must be ‘refreshed’ in order for the printer to work. Every time I want to print. Is that another ‘motherboard’ thing?

15

yup. shop opens day after thanksgiving.