xp home suddenly doesnt detect cd-rw drives?

two of the computers in my house running windows xp home, with ECS motherboards (one a p4, one an athlon xp) suddenly stopped detecting the cd-rw drives in them two days ago. the device manager says the ide controller is working fine, and both drives have power. i even threw both of the drives into my machine running windows xp professional, and both worked fine with no configuration at all.

the only thing i can think of is that i tried to add a dvd-rom drive as a slave on one of the machines, and tried to add a floppy drive (both from my current working xp professional machine. both drives work fine) in the other xp home machine.

upon bootup of both machines, no drives besides the harddrive are being detected. they power on, the trays come out when you hit the button... but windows xp cant find the d: drive.

am i just going to have to take them both to CompUSA and pay $100 a piece to have them worked on?

*edit* i tried clearing the bios on one, that didnt help any. in bios on both of them, the first boot device is none, second is cd, third is hdd. i dont think either of them have backups of known good configurations (stupid me! i thought dvd-rom drives and floppy drives were plug and play!), and i guess i cant even reinstall windows since the cd drives arent being detected. sigh.

hmm, all of our computers are on a lan at home, so it might be a virus causing a corrupted file, right? i dont know, since none of us use outlook, we all use gmail and there are no error messages. is there a generic cd-rw driver or something i can try installing? le sigh. this sucks. =(

so it's not being detected in bios?
checked and double checked cabling/jumpers?

there aren't really drivers to install for optical drives in Windows.

ive had the excact same thing
and i solved it
but i cant remember how what i do know is that it had something to do with deleating or changing something in the registery
ill look around to find out what it was

normally, deleting the values "upperfilter" and "Lowerfilter" will do the trick. however, you would normally see the drive in Device Manager, with details mentioning a corrupted registry.

Is the BIOS even detecting them? It is possible that the IDE ribbon cable has died, so you might wanna try placing another one in it. Also, sometimes WindowsXP has problems detecting some cd-rw and dvd drives if you place them in without a format.

The fact that on boot up the BIOS does not detect the CD-ROMS only the hard drives leads me to think one of 2 things have happened.



The fact that both drives work in another computer leads me to think.

1) By swapping the drives around you damaged your IDE Cable.

2) Summer is here. I don't know what your ambient temps in your room are but maybe the PSUs are getting hot thereby putting out less power and are starting to drop devices.


Try testing the PSUs with a meter and see what your voltages are.