Drive letters to DVD & Dvd-RW not showing

In System, Hardware, Device manager, my Liteon DVD-Rom ltd 163 and My _NEC DVD+RW ND-1100A show up with yellow Exclamation marks. In properties, it says Windows cannot load the device driver for this hardware. The driver may be corrupted or missing. (Code 39). Under drivers there are 4 files there. Used to be 6 before I deleted Roxio CD software that was not working right. I have a Dell Demension 8250, 256K ram, s.4 Mhz cpu, 60 Gig HD. I have hard drive partitioned into C,D,E,F,G,H,I,J,K,L,and M. Done with partition magic Ver. 8. No trouble from 2-1-03 until last week. The dvd was drive N, and the dvd+RW was drive O. Now neither one shows in my computer, or microsoft explorer. Using Dell diagnostics software, which I can boot into, the dvd drive passes all tests. I can boot from N after changing boot sequence in bios. Partition Magic says it keeps cd rom letters and assigns drive letters above them. I do not remember if I changed what could have been D, or E and F to N and O. I did a repair install of 'windows XP yesterday, and that did not restore the drive letters. I have unistalled the drives, and windows XP finds them on boot up and restores them, but does not restore the access letters anywhere. Matter of fact, the windows repair said put CD into Drive N somewhere in that process. I also run perfect disk, cacheman, and have my swap file on D. I do not think that is the problem. Can I write a config.sys file to load and correct this? Will XP load a config.sys file. Thanks for any help.

 

Try this basic fix:
Go back into Device Manager, and delete (uninstall) both drives. Then reboot the system, and let Windows autodetect them and (hopefully) reinstall the drivers correctly.

If that doesn't work, open up Computer Management (Start --> Run --> "compmgmt.msc") and go to Disk Management. Do the drives show up here?

To answer your question: Windows XP will not use a config.sys file. There is one there, but that is only used when running real mode programs (essentially, DOS programs).

 

Try the resolution here:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=314060

If you want to rearrange drive letter assignments after the drives are restored see this:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;307844&Product=winxp

And welcome to Major Geeks

 

Thanks for your quick response! I found the microsoft knowledge base article after I posted this. It was 100% right. I deleted the two lines in the registry and my 2 missing drive letters came back and are accessible. Caused by Roxio CD burner software being removed, although apparently this part was not uninstalled.. I should have known. But, I had uninstalled it at least a day earler before this problem showed up.