inspiron 1100 no longer detecting dvd/cd drive

Please read the entire thing as this is not as straightforward as typical situations with this behavior. Thanks!

Hello all, and thanks for reading this.

I have a client who was having the ntldr either missing or corrupt error on boot. I intended to copy in new versions from my laptop, and also use the utilty from MS that apparently resolves this issue due to excessive indexing on root, but to no avail. Don't get wrapped up in this as it is only background info for the current issue.

We performed a repair installation of XP Home, and the machine became functional again. I showed her how to copy the contents of her old "my docs" to her new one, I installed Office XP, obviously from CD, and recovered her pst, and instructed her that before she was to do anything else online, she was to go through the several hours of windows updates as she was only as sp1. Unfortunately, she decided to ignore that and install her linksys wireless adapter instead of waiting until she is in NY with a wired connection and do the updates. After she installed the software from linksys, her dvd/cd drive no longer shows up under my comp, device mgr, and when we go into bios her optical drive is not detected. The tray opens and closes, spins, whirls, etc. but is not accessable.

I had her restore to the point before she installed the linksys drivers but that changed nothing. Opened the reg looking for the upperfilter lowerfilter fix and neither of those keys existed, which makes sense since i idid not install any burning software. Cannot uninstall the drive because it is not in the dev mgr so i can't force windows to reinstall the native drivers.

Finally, my question is this: without bios recognizing anything, am i wrong to assume that the brown out that she claims caused the ntldr issue at the root of her optical drive now being defunct? during the brownout here in chicago she wasn't connected to a surge protector and the machine was on. why would the dvd/cd drive work long enough for me to install offxp, and her the drivers for the linksys adapter, and then poop out?

Any ideas would be most appreciated, and I hope that all of you are well.