CD-ROMs Failing In Win2k & XP Boxes?

jptechnical writes "I have an interesting hardware/software development brewing. I have a friend with a computer shop down the way and he has had a rash of nearly a dozen Win2k & XP boxes come through with disabled or missing CD-ROM drives. They work in DOS, and are bootable, but are either disabled, not functioning or simply missing in Windows' device manager. Does anyone know of a virus that may be causing this? I cannot find any common vector from system build to software installed or anything. MS says reformat, but where's the fun in that? What resources aside from MSKB and google searching do slashdot readers use for troubleshooting strange problems?"

Comments

Re:Hmm

[lcde]

My parents computer was having this problem. It occured when I have the CDRom in Master Mode on the second IDE port with a slave HD.

Re:Hmm

[Kris_J]

Check for old versions of EasyCD and Windows XP Service Pack 1. That combination all but cripples a PC.

As an aside, I installed Veritas' CD/DVD burning software (or possibly the packet writer software) that came with the company's new Sony USB2/Fireware DVD rewriter and st one point in the installation it said that it had to disable the built-in XP burning software, was that okay? Hell yes! Nicest thing a program has ever offered to do.

Re:Hmm

[buffer-overflowed]

I've seen Windows(up to XP Pro) suddenly forget that hardware exists. Why it does this, I don't know, but it's usually after lots of uptime on a non-often used device(like our CD Copier[not burner, mass copier]). I've also had it forget my NIC is there on boot(that was annoying).

Rebooting or reinstalling the drivers generally tends to fix it. I've never had that problem out of Linux though, even with identical hardware(in the case of the NIC).