Win XP no longer loads drivers for DVD drives - Any ideas???

[tluxon]

My wife's computer had a recent install of Win XP Pro SP2 on a brand new drive with a Pioneer DVD-105S DVD-ROM and a NEC ND-1300A DVD-RW on the secondary IDE channel. For a couple months the DVD drives worked flawlessly, but about 2 days ago their drivers stopped loading in the operating system.

I checked and saw that neither of them show up in Windows Explorer or the Disk Management window of Adminstrator Tools, yet I can boot from either of them depending on how I configure the BIOS. I booted XP to safe mode and uninstalled both drives via the device manager. When restarting, XP found the hardware and installed them both without apparent error. No drives showed up in Disk Management or Windows Explorer.

Next I tried three different System Restores to as far back as 10 days ago and each gave the same result - no DVD drives and the IMAPI driver not loading (Event 7026, which has no entries in MS Knowledge Base).

This is the first time I've seen XP properly identify and install drives on either the primary or secondary IDE channels and NOT be able to load the drivers for them.

Has anyone seen this behavior before or is able to explain what may have happened to cause this? I'm sure the problem would go away with a fresh install of Windows, but I really don't want to take the time to set up my wife's and kids applications all over again. Is there anything else I can do?

Thanks,

Tim

[hellbringer]

firstly i found it to be a great timesaver to backup everything including os and basic apps after u do a fresh install.makes reinstalling a snap.

maybe try switching your ide cable over to the primary channel see if that helps any/maybe save u a reinstall and while your there make sure everything is seated real well. thats all i can think of for now

[Prot]

You can boot from those drives because BIOS loads very basic drivers, so there is nothing wrong with the dvd drives. With your PC powered off, disconnect the IDE cables from both drives, then boot up Windows. Windows will definately not see them now. Then shut down, reconnect the drives and boot up Windows again.

You say that Windows Explorer can not see the drives, but what about your burning software. Can it detect the drives? If you put a CD in a drive, will Media Player see it?

One final suggestion. Have you run a virus check on your system?

[tluxon]

Thanks for the replies.

@hellbringer
I should have done the os and app backup and I will next time around for sure.

@Prot
No apps, including the burning software, can see the drives. I did a thorough virus check on all the drives in the system. I thought of disconnecting the IDE cable to the DVD drives, but figured it wouldn't be any different than uninstalling the secondary IDE and DVD drives from device manager and then having XP rediscover them. I'll try physically disconnecting the cable tonight.

One thing that I found to be somewhat concerning and a likely suspect, was that there were several files in the system32 folder that were dated between 1996 and 1998. That can't help any. A big argument against MS's shared resource philosophy. I'm going to run RegCleaner on it tonight to see if that might make any difference.

Thanks,

Tim

[tluxon]

I configured this computer less than 2 months ago with the OS installed straight up from XP SP2 CDs I got from a Microsoft buddy a couple days before. In hopes of minimizing the amount of babysitting everything my wife or kids install on the computer, I set it up to automatically download and install any XP updates. From the beginning the BIOS was set to defaults with PNP OS set to No.

My wife is quite sure that the only thing she installed since the last successful use of a DVD drive is Macromedia Shockwave, but I don't suspect that caused the problem.

I know our kids like to use a lot of "educational game" programs from The Learning Company and Knowledge Adventure, so it wouldn't surprise me if they mistakenly popped in a CD that sneakily overwrote a file in the system32 folder. Since I've seen a number of files in the system32 folder dated between 1996 and 1998, I really suspect this computer is suffering from the weaknesses of Microsoft's shared resource philosophy. If I had a good way to detect possible suspects, that would probably be the ticket for me. Know of any good tools for something like this?

Thanks,

Tim

[Poppa_Meth]

put your XP CD in and go to start>run then type sfc /scannow and click okay. This will run system file checker and replace any system files that have been changed with the originals. May not help anything at all but it can't hurt to do it just in case.

[smearbrick1]

May I ask as to why your BIOS is set to PNP OS = No?

[Soopafresh]

What brand of PC or motherboard ? There might be a proprietary ide drive controller driver which needs to be reinstalled.

[tluxon]

May I ask as to why your BIOS is set to PNP OS = No?

I've got to admit that Windows XP does a fine job of automatically allocating resources to hardware, but I guess I've just liked that little extra bit of control of having the BIOS influence which interrupts are used. For this problem, I've tried it both ways both uninstalling and re-installing and it didn't seem to make a difference.

What brand of PC or motherboard ? There might be a proprietary ide drive controller driver which needs to be reinstalled.

Good question. I passed on my ASUS CUSL2-C motherboard with a 1 GHz P3 Coppermine processor. It uses the very good Intel 815EP chipset and I already installed the MB and chipset drivers from the ASUS website so the Microsoft ones wouldn't be used. I will definitely try reinstalling those drivers when I get home tonight. In case it's relevant, the PC has a 80GB boot drive by itself on the MB's primary IDE controller and I put in a Promise Ultra133 TX2 controller card for her second 160GB IDE drive. This has been the setup from day one and the DVD drives worked great until just a few days ago.

Any other ideas? Any recommended diagnostic tools?

Thanks,

Tim

[tluxon]

firstly i found it to be a great timesaver to backup everything including os and basic apps after u do a fresh install.makes reinstalling a snap.

Okay, I've completed a fresh install with all the major apps that my wife needs.

I think I'd like to make a bootable DVD-R with a snapshot copy of everything on my boot drive right now. What's the best/easiest way to put me in a position where all I'd have to do is reformat the boot partition and copy all the files back on it so it gets right back up and running like it is now.

If it's a better solution, there's also a 160GB drive in the PC with a blank 16GB partition that I could set up to be the boot drive if needed. Is there a quick-n-easy way to "copy" the boot partition of the current primary drive to the 160GB drive so that all I'd have to do to get her up and running is swap which drive is booted to?

Any other suggestions?

Thanks,

Tim

[pfh]

I made a BartPE bootable cdrom for those times when your OS gets so hosed it won't even boot.

Look here: http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

It's not so easy to just copy a boot partition to another one. It has to be done "outside" of the OS so to speak.