We reinstalled XP on a new HDD, everything went smooth! XP SP2 OEM. After install, proceeded with hardware drivers, all installed seemingly fine. Activated Windows, installed HP printers, FireFox, AVG, and K-Lite Mega Codec Pack. Everything installed was downloaded, except LAN drivers loaded from a flash drive. So we never accessed the DVD drives (there are 2). Then, finally we try to access it, and the drives aren't in My Computer. Check device manager, and they are there, but with the ominous yellow exclamation mark. Device status says something to the effect of device driver loaded but hardware not found. Same thing for both drives. Both drives are labeled correctly in device manager. So, I check Sony, there is a registry patch called SOOOTH-01106200-US.EXE: http://esupport.sony.com/US/perl/swu-download.pl?mdl=VGCRB40&upd_id=2031&os_id=7 None of the reasons for this problem match, but the symptom is the same. So, I try it, but it doesn't work. Then, I uninstalled it from device manager, hoping to force XP to reinstall the drivers. Reboot, and XP installs the drivers again, and has the same problem. Now I'm stumped, what should I do now? This is on a Sony Vaio VGC-RB40 The drives are: Sony DVD RW DW-D22A Sony DVD ROM DDV1615 ~~Dylan

Did they work before you installed the new HDD? Is the new HDD an SATA or PATA? Did you change the drive configuration at all? Check the master/slave jumpers?

No hardware changes too the optical drives. New HDD is SATA, as was the old (replaced). No jumper changes. Optical drives are IDE (PATA). Bios settings are the same, and it boots from a CD, it appears to be a Windows/driver issue. ~~Dylan

Optical drives don't need special drivers.

If they are on the same cable, disconnect each drive and see if the other one works.

You may have not installed the motherboard chipset drivers. Or, the cables or jumpers may be configured wrong. If both drives are connected to the same cable one must be jumpered to Master and one to Slave. Or, BOTH must be jumpered to CS (cable select). One other possibility is that the IDE controller is NOT enabled in the BIOS.