Hey all, its me (again) I am having another issue that I cant figure out, though this time its with my laptop. I recently reformated the hard disk drive using the HP recovery disks, and so far everything is working fine except for my dvd drive and extra hard drive. the laptop is an HP dv8210us with windows xp home edition (service pack 3). I have the stock 80 gig hard drive, which has 2 partitions, the primary partition whiche is 65 gig, and the recovery partition, which takes the rest of it. i also had a 4 gig extra hard drive in there, not cuz i needed 4 gigs but cuz the drive was free, and the stock pioneer dvdrw drive. before the reformat it all worked fine, I could see all the disk drives and partitions (including the recovery partition) after the reformats a different story however. now, in my computer, it only recognizes the primary partition, nothing else. it doesnt recognize the extra hard drive or dvd drive, and i have no access to either. i insert a dvd or cd, the light on the player flashes on like its reading it, but nothing happens. I went into device manager, and device manager recognizes both the extra hard drive and dvd drive and says they are working fine and the drivers are up to date. I took the extra hard drive out in case there was a conflict there, and that didnt work either. I have also tried uninstalling the drivers and reinstalling them as well, and downloading all the latest drivers from HP. any one know whats going on? any help would be appreciated, thanks.

Open up computer managment which is under administrative tools. Look under storage and find disk managment. There you will find a listing of all of the detected hard drives, partitions, and optical drives. Make sure everything under there has a drive letter. It isn't usable if it doesn't have a drive letter & won't show up. Sometimes XP needs help allotting drive letters

you know its weird cuz my dad (a computer programmer) suggested I do the same thing last night, and I tried, but it wouldnt allow me to then (the button to change drive letter was faded out) but when I just tried it again, it worked fine. my dvd drive is now working great. thanks for the help, ive concluded windows is just plain retarded. anyway, ya thanks again.

Try one of these:
1. You can no longer access the CD drive or the DVD drive, or you receive an error message after you remove a CD recording program or a DVD recording program in Windows XP: "error code 31"
or...
2. http://aumha.org/downloads/cdgone.zip
or...
3. Go to Device Manager, click a "+" sign next to IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers.
You'll see two items:
- ATA Channel0 (or Primary Channel)
- ATA Channel1 (or Secondary Channel)
Right click on each of them, and click Uninstal. Confirm.
Restart Windows. They'll be automatically reinstalled.

I got it thanks

You're welcome
Which one was the fix?

Originally Posted by the_patriot2008

you know its weird cuz my dad (a computer programmer) suggested I do the same thing last night, and I tried, but it wouldnt allow me to then (the button to change drive letter was faded out) but when I just tried it again, it worked fine. my dvd drive is now working great. thanks for the help, ive concluded windows is just plain retarded. anyway, ya thanks again.

Well I didn't even know if it would be available b/c I forgot what you can do with XP home & what they DON'T let you do but I thought that I'd suggest this. I'm use to XP pro & you can do that with pro. I don't know why it would & then it wouldn't...windows in general can be weird sometimes. Especially Vista. Glad it worked.

yeah I agree. I dont know why it would and wouldnt other then, well its windows, what can I say. its possible i did it wrong the first time to who knows. I have never actually used windows pro, though Ive heard its the best version of xp out there, I never spent the money on it since home came with the computers i bought and it did all I needed it to. and yes, i agree with u on vista, i have vista ultimate on my gaming rig, and theres many days im tempted just to erase it and go back to XP. but anyway, thanks again for the help.

You're welcome. I've used XP home on my parents old computer & I don't like how you can't do certain stuff on it compared to pro, especially in the administrative tools but really thats the main reason for paying the extra bucks for it. That and the remote desktop. The restrictions based on version are even worse in vista but there are none with Ultimate, which I don't have. And even XP has it's quirks no matter which version.

yeah, i know it, ive often thought of buying pro, but ya know, the way i figure it, the more toys it has, the more bugs it has, and xp home always did what i wanted to-right now the only system i use XP on is my laptop and all i use it for is web surfing, portable entertainment, and trips, nothing xp home cant handle, so thats what i use it for. only reason I have vista on the desktop was the directx10 gaming, and from what ive seen, the toys with vista ultimate are nice, but not really needed, and just like my rule, the more toys equals the more bugs. the aero interface is really unstable, especially using an integrated graphics card. its better with my ATI card but still unstable. i know several people with vista premium who have no issues with it, i might just downgrade. I prolly wont but the thought is tempting.