CD and DVD drive not recognised!!!!

Ok, so this may be a long story...
Had a prob a few months ago with my optical drives as they werent recognised.
Have an exclamation mark in the device manager, and both are not in My Computer.
Both work because when the Windows CD is in before windows starts, can access the Windows installation and repair.
Cannot update drivers because both are OEM.
Drives are - Sony CD-RW CRX230EE and Sony DVD-ROM DDU1622
(I like Sony as you can tell)
I could not find any solutions to the problem and so I refomatted, I like my games and I rely heavily on these optical drives to give me my kick
After the format, both drives worked, yay! Installed all the drivers for other hardware and all was great again.
Often when Windows is loading I get the Blue Screen Of Death and Windows loads fine after a few times of restarting.
But then about a week ago I got the message asking to check the disk for 'consistency' before start-up, and I kept skipping it until yesterday.
So I let it 'check' my disks, and it seemed to delete lots of registry entries.
Hmmmm...I thought, that can't be totally good.
Suddenly my optical drives werent recognised again! My sound driver seems to be messed up because I can't play music now aswell. It's onboard sound. AC'97. I can't install drivers for the sound because the optical drives don't work! A Visious Circle.
I don't want to reformat again, but it may have to be a last resort!
Does anyone know of a solution to this annoying problem???

SETUP
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 3500+
Memory: 1GB RAM
Graphics: ATI Radeon X850 Platinum
Motherboard:MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum
Hard Drive: Hitachi DeskStar T7K250 250GB
OS: Windows XP Professional

 

For starters you could doing a 'driver rollback' from within the device manager.

While you are in the device manager what is the condition of your hardware?

Remove the roms & bootup again if necessary.

Also what file system are you using? Maybe NTFS would be more secure.

 

Have a look at these 2 sites there may be your fix there as far as drivers go...

http://www.cdfreaks.com/drive

http://www.softwarepatch.com/utilities/ac97.html

 

I've tried searching for drivers on the web before, nothing for my two drives, but thanks anyhoo!

Can't do driver rollback because no past drivers, just plug and play.

Now that you mention it, in the Device Manager, the 'Plug and Play Software Device Enumerator' has an exclamation mark, lol. Aswell as my 'Realtek AC'97 Audio' and 'USB Controller'!
If I can solve the plug and play problem, optical drives and USB should work.

I also, have no idea about file systems!

 

Have you got the latest chipset drivers ??