Optical Drive Help

[mickey987]

I turned my computer on this morning hoping to import some songs onto my computer but nothing happened. I went into "My Computer" and my two Optical Drives didn't show up. I turned off the computer, booted into bios and it detects the two drives fine. I went back into windows xp, device manager and there was this exclamation mark on the two drives. It says that it loaded the drivers but could not find the hardware. The two drives work, if i hit the eject button on both drives they open up. My first drive is an NEC DVD writer and my second is an LG DVD rom drive. I haven't opened up the case to make sure everything's plugged in, but I don't think that's the problem because my BIOS detects the drives just fine.
What's wrong?
What should I do?
The windows trouble shooter did not help at all...
Does this have anything to do with INQ (right word?) numbers...I remember reading about that somewhere.


Edit: Oops, sorry! I didn't realize there was a sub section on Optical drives...

 

[defakto]

Was everything working correctly before?

Shouldn't be an IRQ issue if something was working before. It's possible one of the drives went bad or something went wrong within in windows. I would start by testing the drives in another system to see if they work, if possible. If not, i'd double check jumpers and cable to make sure that they are on the correct positions, master/slave and master on end of cable, slave on middle. Though, that probably won't help.

 

[mickey987]

Everything was working properly until this morning when I turned on the computer. I moved my computer to the living room to plug it into the computer but that was it. Im pretty sure the optical drives were working last night, I know for a fact it was working yesterday morning because I imported a CD, and played a game that needed a cd check.

I plugged my ide cable into the next empty slot. When XP started up, it detected the two drives, two bubbles popped up displaying that it detected the drives. It still doesn't show up in My Computer and in the device manager it it still displays the warning, "drivers loaded but could not find hardware".

Ugh...I don't want to re-install windows...is there anything else I can do besides that?

Edit: I dont know if this matters but it just occured to me that My Computer states I have a 3 1/2 inch Floppy installed, which I dont.