[6t8gt]

First of all, the computer (Dell Vostro 200) is my wifes from her work (small church). After informing me that she can't get online anymore from getting a virus on it, I said I'd fix it for her. She said it got a virus about 3 months back - nice. The virus(s) are dug in deep, real deep. Just quickly, system restore is gone and I can't eliminate the virus in safe mode either with Spybot or AVG. So, I decided to redo the whole machine. I'm not posting in the virus section because I decided to use the Dell system reinstall disc that came with the computer and redo the whole thing. However, I discovered that both the CD/DVD ROM and the RW CD/DVD drives won't operate. I've uninstalled them and rebooted in both safe mode and normal modes, and even tried the find new hardware command etc and I get an error that says the driver may be corrupted or is missing. I went to Dell's driver download section and downloaded the drivers for this, and I can't get the re-install driver to find anything in the directory that I unzipped the files to. Since there are two drives and neither of them will work, I'm defaulting to believe that a virus has somehow disabled the drives, not that both drives have failed. I do hear the disc spin (not very fast) and I believe I hear the head move when a disc is inserted. I've been around computers for 12 years and done my fair share of regedit over the years to remove issues on the computer, so I'm not new at fixing a computer. But, at this time this is the most infected machine I've seen and I'd just like the drives to work so I can save our data and then wipe the machine clean and start over. Anyone got any ideas.

Edited by 6t8gt, 14 February 2011 - 01:21 PM.