Losing Drives

[not important]

I have a DVD drive and a CDRW. Both quit working randomly. I look in Device Manager and they are there and , according to Device manager, they are OK and working properly. I uninstall them and reboot and XP finds them and all is OK for awhile. I can't pinpoint anything that causes this. It started happening after I installed round cables to DVD,CDRW and Floppy drives. I tried reinstalling the ribbon cables but that didn't help. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

[kilgoretrout]

Check to make sure no pins were bent during your cable swapping. It sounds like it might be a power supply issue. When you were changing out your cables, did you change any of the power plugs going to your cdrw/dvd drives? You might try swithing the power plugs around. Check your jumpers to make sure they weren't knocked off or disturbed in the cable changing process. That's not likely however.

[not important]

I checked the pins right after I reinstalled the old cables.
I never touched the power plugs to either drive.
I checked the jumpers. They're good.
This problem happens randomly.
I appreciate the response though.

[kilgoretrout]

It could be one of your drives is going bad or the power supply is going bad. One thing you could do to troubleshoot is disconnect one of the drives, both the power cable and the ribbon cable, and run for a while. Having one less drive will lessen the power demands on the PSU. Also, if it's a bad drive, disconnecting it will stop it from causing trouble with your system. If you still get intermittent errors, try disconnecting the other drive and reconnecting the first drive. It might help narrow things down.

[tyoung]

Try checking the fan in your powersupply. A bad fan in there will cause heat build up and power fluctuations. Thus causing that type of problem.
Also power supply fluctuations could cause damage to the rest of the computer.
One question: What brand of parts do you have in the computer, and what operating system?

[not important]

The DVD player is a Samsung CDRW is NEC. Using XP home.
I'll try the things that kilgoretrout suggedted.

[not important]

After a shutdown and reboot, both drives would cease to function. If I uninstalled both drives and rebooted, XP would find them and they would work until I shutdown again.
I thought of something that was changed after I installed the round cables. I installed NTI CD Maker. I just uninstalled it and installed Roxio. I've shutdown and rebooted several times and the drives are functional.

[Cricket]

See this MS Knowledge Base Article (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;315350)

And this one (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;320553)

And this one (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;en-us;q314060)

:) Cricket

[not important]

Roxio seems to have resolved the problem. I've never had any problems with Roxio.
The drives were always visible in Device Manager and it reported them as functioning properly.
Somehow, NTI CD Maker was causing the drives not to be recognized.

[mike breck]

So did you have Roxio and NTI installed at the same time - or just NTI?

How did you resolve the problem - updating or uninstalling
NTI?

[not important]

Only NTI was installed.
I uninstalled NTI and installed Roxio, which seems to have resolved the problem.
I just finished copying a CD, for a test, and rebooted and both drives are working.

[mike breck]

Glad you're up and running.

Thanks for the clarification.

:)

[tyoung]

Hey Not Important, try installing NTI along with Roxio, the little fire breather is working fine for me.

ALSO, you might want to check your ECM FUSE.