I’ve got me a problem. Well, no, my dad has himself a problem. I recently installed Windows XP on the family computer (a Compaq box that previously ran horribly under Windows ME, runs amazingly under XP… aside from this problem). At first, the two drives connected to it - a DVD-ROM and a CD-RW drive (both from Compaq) - ran fine. We installed stuff, we burned a few CD’s, life was good.
Then, a few weeks later, PFFT!.. they stop working. The drives still have power, and apparently the Windows XP repair function still detects them (although the function didn’t help much), so there’s nothing wrong with the drives physically. It’s the drivers. WinXP’s drivers are, apparently, bad. I tried replacing them from the CD, I tried the Help and Support menus, I tried finding new drivers online… to no avail.
Heck, it even got so annoying that we thought to just buy new drives (they needed to be upgraded anyway) to see if that might work. Nope.
Right now, I have tried every last thing I could think of, and have gotten to the point where I want to reinstall XP (yeah, I know it’s awkward, but I know how to do it quite easily)… however, since this would require lots of backing up and an assload of setting XP back up to our personal settings, I’m going to throw the towel to the Teeming Millions… anyboyd run into this problem? Anyone know how to force XP to take just the CD/DVD drivers off the installation CD without having to format and reinstall?
Second on that question, what does the BIOS see? The drivers are very basic drivers, and there are no updates for em. Usually with a drive, it’s either a BIOS issue, or the controller needs a driver that Windows is missing.
Can you find the files required in the CAB files on the CD, and just manually copy them over? Or, go into the Device Manager, right click on the drive, click on properties, then the driver tab, then ‘update driver’ and then the radio button that tells XP you want to tell it where to look for the drivers: force it to look on the CD, and that yes, you really want to use those ones and overwrite what’s on the computer.
Hopefully between making sure the BIOS is doing things right, and smacking XP around, this’ll get solved.
Yup, BIOS sees the drives just fine. And I’m pretty sure it’s just the XP drivers that are just corrupted. I’m going to dig through the CAB file on the XP CD and see if I can find them.
Anybody know exactly what files the drivers need to be in, or does it not matter? (I’m asking on the off-chance that it’s different than it was in Win98).
Also do you have a restore point you could restore back
to before this stuff happened? It might be a registry thing & restoring it back a week or so might work for you.
I have done it before myself. Im assuming XP has Restore, it better.