[jswansonsr]

I am running Win2K Professional on a Micron Clientpro CS. I have 2 IDE hard drives, a NEC 282 CD-ROM (read only) and a Plextor USB CD-Rom (R/W), and 256 Kb of memory on board. Also have an Iomega Zip drive, and a 256Mb thumb drive. As recently as Wednesday, both the CD-ROM drives were working because I copied a CD from the NEC to the Plextor (no copyright violation involved!). Then by Friday (maybe Thursday) both these drives disappeared from "My Computer". A look at the Device Manager shows both drives present, but with a warning icon and a message that Windows cannot load the drivers. The driver files appear to be OK in the drivers folder on WINNT/System32.

I have uninstalled and reinstalled these drives about a dozen times -- no luck. In "My Computer", the drive letters did not rearrange, that is, the drive letters are just removed from the list.

Any suggestion as to what may be the problem, and how to solve it, will be appreciated. I am relatively computer literate, and I'm not afraid to fiddle with the registry or to move system files around. (I didn't do any of that between the last time I used the drives and the time they disappeared, though.)

Thanks for helping.

Jim S.

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Hi,

Might want to check this link out.

CD-ROM Drive or DVD-ROM Drive Appear To Be Missing

I know, it's not exact to what happened to you, but I once used this fix before, and it fixed the same exact problem, and I didn't reinstall XP. So this fix might work for you as well. Try it out. If you are missing one of the settings in the registry, don't worry about it. Just skip that key. Go to the next. Make sure you follow the directions.

Good luck!!

B

[Besttechie]

Hi,

Might want to check this link out.

CD-ROM Drive or DVD-ROM Drive Appear To Be Missing

I know, it's not exact to what happened to you, but I once used this fix before, and it fixed the same exact problem, and I didn't reinstall XP. So this fix might work for you as well. Try it out. If you are missing one of the settings in the registry, don't worry about it. Just skip that key. Go to the next. Make sure you follow the directions.

Good luck!!

B

[jswansonsr]

The suggestion posted by Bestttechie worked like a charm.The link he gave was to a MS KB item describing the situation for XP, but there was a link on that page to the same item for Win2K.

The instructions called for an edit of one registry key. Two little tweaks, and my drives are back with me.

If you ever lose your drives and get a reference to an "Error 31" message, this KB reference will help.

Jim S.

[Besttechie]

No problem, glad to help.

B