Hi, I found that my cd rom & dvd drives are not working, under device manager it says working ok and they open ok but read nothing. There are no icons for the drives under my computer. I think they are not installed because when i turn my computer on it says not installed. I tried a system restore with no joy.

I had a new graphics card fitted today so could this be the problem?

How do I get the drives back running?

First off I would check the connections on the drives and the motherboard.

While installing the Graphics Card the connections might have been jarred.


However if they are seen in the Device Manager they are being detected.

What exactly do you mean by: "when i turn my computer on it says not installed"

Where does it say that? In the BIOS POST?


Another approach is right click the drives in the Device Manager and choose Uninstall then reboot.

Also in your Device Manager check IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers.

Hi, when my computer starts up and it shows you a list of all the computers hardware, processor etc it says that slave and second slave are not installed (that screen is only up for a second and i cant read it that well)
also when i look at my cd rom/dvd drives on device manager it shows the cd rom drive and H + H DVD-ROM DVD-41SD SCSI DcRom Device.

Are both these drives set up as slaves? Primary slave and Secondary slave?

Is your hard drive the Primary Master? Or do you have a SATA drive?

As a first try I would uninstall these drives in the Device Manager and reboot.

XP should re-detect the drives and load drivers.

If that doesn't help I would open it up and re-do all the IDE connections.

well i'm not sure about all that, I dont know what wires are which inside. I've already uninstalled the drives but that does not work. When I took my computer in to pc world and the graphics card was installed the cd drives must of worked because the cd rom with the drivers on was used. I got the pc back home and it would not turn on so I took it back and the power supply was broken now (dont know how its a mystery) so I had a new power supply fitted. maybe the cd drives were upset then.

As a first try I would uninstall these drives in the Device Manager and reboot.

I've already uninstalled the drives but that does not work. When I took my computer in to pc world and the graphics card was installed the cd drives must of worked because the cd rom with the drivers on was used. I got the pc back home and it would not turn on so I took it back and the power supply was broken now (dont know how its a mystery) so I had a new power supply fitted. maybe the cd drives were upset then.

Sounds like it. Anytime you work inside you might just nudge a connector.

If you don't want to open it up yourself I would suggest taking it back as it appears to be their fault.

If you want to try yourself I can dig up some guides with photos. Let us know.

thanks but i will take it back 2moz, I'm sure the wires where upset when the power supply was fitted.

thanks again

No problem. Let us know how it goes and or if we can help further in the future!