added a couple hard drives... now the optical drives are gone?!?

C

ChingChang

Supreme [H]ardness
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Mar 27, 2003
Messages
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Here's what I had before adding drives:
1 WD 74gb raptor
1 16x dvd burner
1 virtual drive
Windows XP Professional

on Friday, around 2pm I installed two 250gb SATA hard drives. Booted up fine, no trouble booting to windows, and both drives formatted easily as I was at class

Got back from class around 7 or something, and saw that the drives appeared to be working, then I installed some program using my DVD drive. Worked fine.
After this I loaded up an image of a game to my virtual drive, and began playing for a bit.

Saturday (around 5-7pm?) I decided to setup an internet connection for my other computer, using crossover cable and this computer. I had to install network drivers from my motherboard driver CD, so I installed those then finished setting up the connection.

I don't recall using either of my optical drives after installing the drivers, although I might have used the virtual drive to play that game once or twice. Can't remember right now. It's possible though.

Then Sunday or maybe even Saturday night I tried playing a game but it kept asking to insert the CD...

So I check My Computer and I see only my floppy drive, and my three hard drives. Virtual drive and DVD Burner are not there.

In the device manager, under DVD/CD-ROM drives, the DVD drive and the virtual drive were both detected, but there was a yellow circle with exclamation mark in the corner, which is usually not a good sign for hardware that once worked...

So I try a few things but nothing is working. I reinstalled the virtual drive several times, and it installs successfully, but the drive does not show up in My Computer, and when I go to change the drive letter for the virtual drive, I just get an error. "Unable to set new drive letter" and after reinstalling the yellow circle is gone.

After I mess around with the virtual drive, I just right clicked the DVD drive and clicked uninstall. Then I restart computer and it detected new hardware, which was the DVD drive. It said it installed successfully, but drive does not show up in My Computer. It does not have the yellow circle in Device Manager anymore either.


Right now I'm out of ideas... I am not going to reformat. I want to at least try to fix the problem before I start over.
 
Go into Disk Management and make sure it has a drive letter assigned. I would imagine the problem was that the virtual drive and DVD drive letters got screwed up.

To get to Disk Management
Right-click My Computer > Manage
 
check to see what drive the virtual device is set to... what are u using anyway? daemon tools? or ? I have it set to U drive... because virtual drives sometimes mess up drive letter assignments, esp when u use a lot of removable media like compact flash. anywayz. good luck
 
I'm using Daemon tools. I cannot change the drive letter. It isn't set to anything I don't think, cause when I go to the screen where I choose the drive letter nothing is selected. And when I select any drive letter it says it can't change it.


S1nF1xx said:
Go into Disk Management and make sure it has a drive letter assigned. I would imagine the problem was that the virtual drive and DVD drive letters got screwed up.

To get to Disk Management
Right-click My Computer > Manage
Click to expand...
I tried this already. Disk Management doesn't detect the drives, but I did notice at least one of the drives while I was formatting the hard drives.
 
Do a search on support.microsoft.com for missing CD drives and filter drivers.
 
If I do a system restore, should I unplug my two SATA hard drives that I added and then plug them back in once the other drives are working?
 
ok, everything appears to be working fine now

I just made a ghost image of my system drive in case anything happened, then shut down and unplugged the two storage drives. Booted up and did a system restore back to Friday night after the drives were installed. My DVD burner and virtual drive were both detected, and I set them to drive Y and Z. Then I just shut down and plugged the storage drives back in, and they were both detected as D and E when it started up.
 
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