Combo Drive Not Recognized by XP Home SP2

[Mudjock]

I am at my wits end trying to help an acquaintance with a problem. A while back I installed a Lite-On CD-RW/DVD-ROM Drive along with Roxio Easy CD Creator 5.3.5 Platinum in an HP Pavilion 6835 for a family (Celeron 800, 128 MB RAM). They recently purchased and installed Windows XP Home with SP Home (I can't remember if 98 or ME was installed previously). Now, XP is not recognizing the drive at all. It is recognized correctly in the BIOS, which I have updated to the latest revision. When I put a disc in, the drive spins up, but nothing else happens. I figured something might be amiss between Roxio and SP2, so I tried to uninstall EZCD, but it says I need the CD for that - which, given that the drive is not recognized, does little good. I tried replacing the drive with a different brand/model - same problem. In the device manager, the little yellow exclamation point appears, claiming that the drivers are loaded, but the hardware cannot be found. If I uninstall and let windows find the drive, it sometimes claims to find it, but never says it is ready for use. I have also tried putting the drive on the same IDE channel as the HD and tried a different IDE cable - all to no avail. Any ideas?

 

[zephead]

you hp system is oem and probably not fully compatible with your new hardware/operating system. if this is true you will be at the mercy of hp's highly priced parts sales. if it were up to me i'd get rid of that hp system and go for a homebuilt, oem computers are bad on many, many, many levels and in my opinion they are a waste of money for individual end-users. good luck

 

[Mudjock]

Well, I certainly agree with your assessment of these types of systems. That's what has taken me down the path of building my own computers, which has ulitimately led to building and fixing computers for others. This particular computer belongs to a low income single mother of two who works with my wife. One of her children saved his money and purchased an MP3 player and Windows XP so he could transfer music to and from it easily. Therefore, I would like to find some resolution other than "I'm sorry, your computer is a piece of *&%&%." Any help would be appreciated.

 

[Mudjock]

Problem solved.... After reading Microsoft article 314060, I realized that it might apply to my situation. Applying the registry fix allowed xp to see and use my drive. I proceeded to uninstall EZCD 5.3.5 and replace with an XP SP2-compatible version of Nero.