my computer crashed a few days ago and i was forced to reinstall windows XP. everything runs fine except my cd burner. i will not burn disks anymore. im not sure what happened, but i think somewhere during the reinstall a driver for it got screwed up. every burning program ive tried either locks up, or gives me a bunch of error messages before it even starts to burn. i think i need to reinstall drivers, but i dont know where to look. i have a HP Pavilion 7970 running Windows XP (it originally had Windows ME, but i upgraded it to XP a year ago with no difficulties and have been running XP ever since ive owned it). can anyone help me find the drivers i need? perhaps the manfacturer of my cd drive's website? i cant find it. please help, all help or advice would be greatly appreciated, thanks in advance! Trinity

heres some more info: ive tried using easy cd creator 5, pyro 1.5, and Nero 6.0 to burn the cds. the programs all worked fine before but not now. ive also tried to burn the cd on all speeds, from 8x to 1x, and that doesnt help either. another question is if i uninstall the driver for it, will windows reinstall it for me if i go into the device manager? will the option to reinstall be there even tho i dont have the HP start up disk?

You don't need special drivers for an CD-ROM or CDRW drive. Your problem is something else...did you try reinstalling the burning software? Any idea what caused it to crash?

yea i tried uninstalling and reinstalling them all, with no luck. so i defragged hopin that would help, but that didnt do it either the thing that had to have caused it to crash was when i reinstalled windows xp the other day, it hasnt worked since. any ideas?

You probably need updates for each of the burning programs. Go to their sites and download the updates.

Hi Trinity, I disagree with the other two replies. No offense. You do need driver(s). Whether you call them special is up to you. I'm running 2k, but it's very similar. Try this. Expand the cdrom.sy_ from th XP CD. ### Expanding e:\i386\cdrom.sy_ to c:\temp\cdrom.sys. e:\i386\cdrom.sy_: 15402 bytes expanded to 27376 bytes, 77% increase. ### And compare the size to the existing driver. If they are the same size they're probably OK [a CRC or MD5 is always a good idea.] If not the same size the installed one is almost surely broke. If this gets you nowhere, try the UN/RE-install driver. I think it will ask for the XP CD, not HP. Let us know.

Mechanix2Go, Maybe I wasn't clear with my explanation...but what I mean by "special" drivers is that you don't need to install drivers to get an optical drive to work...they're already included in the operating system. I highly doubt this is a driver issue... Trinity, Your answer brings up another question. You said your system crashed after reinstalling WinXP. Why did you have to reinstall XP? Apparently you were already having some sort of problem that prompted you to attempt a reinstall. Knowing what the previous problem was may shed some light on your current problem....