Iretoben

Hello, I booted up my comp today to find that both optical drives had mysteriously vanished from My Computer. I've seen this before in Win 95 where you had to edit the original DOS .bat's, but this is XP, where's the DOS? Device Manager produces this error code for the drives: Windows successfully loaded the device driver for this hardware but cannot find the hardware device. (Code 41) Click Troubleshoot to start the troubleshooter for this device. I'm willing to believe that one of the drives may have failed, but both at once seems a little fishy to me. I've done the following: A: Downloaded all the updates to Windows I could find. B: Disconnected every pherical I own C: Set the drives to their simplest settings D: Opened the case and physically changed the IDE ports to make sure that part of the mobo isn't burned out. E: Followed every step on both Windows and HP's non-useful troubleshooters. F: Tried restarting the comp with disks in the drives, disks out of the drives, etc... G: Checked the BIOS to be sure that the comp is looking for the right hardware. H: Yes, I checked for newer drivers too. I: Restarted the computer more times than I want to think of. Any help would be greatly appreciated. I don't want to have to use my Windows boot disks because I (being a naive fool) bought a comp with preinstalled Windows, so I need to use the OEM Disks and they'll just overwrite everything (provided that the comp recognises the drives with the Boot Disks in them). Thanks, (all the ugly data follow) Win XP, SP 2 Compaq Presario 6350 US CD-R/RW SW-240B

YAY! My drive's back. That Sampson's a computer-genius-man! <bows> Now I gotta hook the DVD drive back up and make sure it works too. Only other problem I've run into as yet is I had to reinstall every piece of software that used the burner before they'd run, but hey, well worth it. Thanks a million