This has been happening a couple of days now.......i have a DVD drive and a CD-RW drive along with my floppy and hdd, when i go into 'my computer' or device manager there is only mention of floppy and hdd!! neither of my cd drives can be found!! if i click on their icons on the desktop i get the message...'D:\ refers to a location that is unavailable' also if i go to DOS and type D:\ i get 'invalid drive specification' this really has me stumped and is very important to me!! both of my drives are in fine working order....... NOTE: i went to my BIOS and they are listed in their!!! any ideas? Thankyou Slash

Go into system properties/device manager and make sure your cd drives are listed. If they are, remove both devices and reboot. Windows will find the drives and reinstall them. Post back if this does not work or if the drives are not listed in device manager.

Can you remove them from the DEVICE MANAGER in CONTROL PANEL then reboot? They will get reinstalled automatically. If that does not work post back.

Nope, they are not in my device manager list!!! :( Thanx for those replies guys, but got anything else up your sleeves? the only place i can see an icon for either of the drives is on my desktop, an icon for my dvd drive........it doesnt work Thanx Again Slash

If they are not being autodetected on windows startup, your ide controller may be dying. I am not sure if it will work for this type of diagnostic, but try belarc advisor (I read about it here). It may tell you if your IDE controller is working correctly. http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html On another note: did you change any hardware? Are the slave/master settings correct? Do the drives work ok in a different pc?

you lost your primary ide driver. It happens alot when you install me. you need to reinstall your primry ide driver. go to device manager and find your primary ide device and download the driver and reinstall