I have an AMD Athlon System on an Asus A7V Motherboard. My harddrive recently crashed, and I had to reinstall everything. The reinstallation of Windows ME went smoothely enough, though I realized I didn't have my RICOH CD-RW/DVD ROM drivers here. The CD-ROM was working OK though, so I thought there was no problem. Then, a couple days ago, I noticed the CD-ROM drive had disappeared from my drives list in Windows. Windows still detects it, but there are now yellow exclamation points next to my Primary and Secondary IDE Controllers in the Device List, and, as my CD-ROM is on the Primary Controller, the drive isn't talking to Windows anymore. The problem with the Controllers appeared quite suddenly, and after several days of heavy downloading, so I suspected a boot sector virus. But, after several virus scans with an updated Norton Antivirus, nothing of the sort has turned up. I have tried installing various Controller Drivers, and even tried removing the VIA Bus Master Controller, so as to allow Windows to redetect it, but that just caused major confusion. (I had to use an emergency boot disk prog to restore the registry.) I'm at a loss, and I really need my CD Drive back. I'd rather not have to reinstall Windows, and I'm not even sure that would solve the problem. Please advise. Thanks.

Have you tried getting inside PC and checking the guts area, cables, etc? Have you been into the BIOS?

Could be a NOIDE entry in your registry... Run REGEDIT and search for NOIDE It will be here if you have it in your registry HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CURRENTCONTROLSET\SERVICES\VXD\IOS Look on right hand screen for NOIDE and delete it, if found

I have checked the BIOS and the Registry, and there is nothing wrong there, as far as I can see. The BIOS has no trouble recognizing the CD-ROM drive; it appears to be a problem isolated to Windows. ASUS doesn't make a special IDE driver for this motherboard. I guess I'll just try reinstalling the OS... -Logan

There is also a chance that the drive is failing, in addition to any other problem. If you reinstall Windows, I would fdisk the drive, removing the partition, restarting, adding the partition, setting it Active, then format,install Windows. BEFORE you do, make sure you have a good working recovery disk, test it out. If you have the upgrade version of Windows, you will need an older Windows setup disk to put in when it says it cannot find the system to upgrade. And lastly, if the CD does not work (this time), you will not be able to reinstall windows. If you test the recovery disk first, and it boots up, you select With CD support. If it then finds the CD and gives it a drive letter, you know things should eventually work out. But have those special drivers too. I make subdirectories for my driver disks and put them on the hard drive. Then if I have to I can copy them back onto floppies if I lose the floppy.