Here's the story. My 9 month old Gateway's CDR & DVD aren't being recognized. Been online with Gateway and all the fixes they told me to try don't work. (Removing the devices in device manager and re-booting worked at one time, but not anymore)Re-seated cables, scanned for viruses, scanreg/restore, system restore , nothing worked. So they tell me to re-install Windows. But I can't do that because the CD's cant be read (the drives don't work). So they now tell me to take it to a Gateway store and get a new cd & dvd (its still under warranty). Does this sound like what I should do or does anybody have any other ideas? Oh, another thing, sometimes when I re-booted, they worked, but lately even that's not happening.

hello you can try this first befor takeing it back goto start,run,type regedit,eddit,fined,type NOIDE and delete any you fined reboot try your cdr-dvd see if it works. if not let them put a new one.

And if that does not work, check the hardware out with DOS. Get out your Windows ME Recovery diskette (don't have one, format a diskette and make one from Add/Remove Programs - Startup Disk tab) and boot the system with it. At the menu select loading with CD-ROM support option. It takes awhile to boot, don't worry about the error messages, they are for SCSI drives. Note which drive letters are assigned to the drives should be E: and F: or highter. If you do not get these messages at the end, the BIOS is not setup corrctly, or the hardware is broken. Try a DIR F: command to the drive. Oh, put a CD in them, a data CD. Try doing a DIR F: or DIR E: etc. and see if they can read the CDs. If you can not read them this way, then its a hardware problem. If you can read them OK, then its a Windows problem.

So, if it's a hardware problem, I should have the CD & DVD replaced? And if it's a windows problem, I should reinstall windows? If it is a windows problem, how do I reinstall if the computer can't read the Windows ME CD's?