I Need Help! I'm not really great at trouble shooting hardware problems and I'm not totally sure if this is even a hardware issue. In my pc, I had an optirite cd-rw drive and a generic dvd+r burner. They both mysteriously stopped working so i tried to take both out and put in a Toshiba dvd-rom. Once I did this, i get a blue screen everytme I try to boot windows (xp). The error only stays up for about 2 seconds before the system auto reboots. the only thing i got from the error says that my pc's gonna shut down to avoid damage. I tried boting up in safe mode but could not find what was causing the problem. When I switched drives back to what I had originally, It allows me to boot up ok, but the drives still don't work. Does anyone know what's going on? Please help...

Have you tried them in another PC? Maybe the IDE-cable got damaged or gotten loose? Maybe your PSU is slowly dying?

Possibly unrelated, but I just overhauled a mates pc, with a new board, ram, cpu, graphics card, but I also swapped the dvd-rom to a pioneer 106 dvd writer. This produced the same problem. Format and reinstall solved it.

Could it be XP saying that it's a hardware change too far and it can't cope?

Shouldn't be...all you should have ot do is uninstall it from the device manager and reboot, or turn it off and replace, and XP should find the new one with no problems.

Keyword being 'should'.

There is a setting in 2k / XP that could help narrowing the cause down:

Control Panel - System - Advanced - Startup and Recovery - untick "Automatically reboot".