CD/DVDROM Drive Hates Me...

I joined this forum forever ago and didn't remember until just now. I'm kind of a big internet geek and haven't had a computer for a couple weeks now. It hurts.

I don't really know too much about hardware. My computer is a Northgate, of all things. It was one of those everything-in-the-box-for-cheap deals and I've had it since 2002. Given that I had to replace the keyboard, mouse, monitor, RAM, and one of the fans already, it's not too surprising that something else should pop up. But this time it's not something I know how to fix...

The CD/DVD drive has been failing for a while now. It takes discs and only wants to let them go once in a while. The computer says that the drive exists and is functioning normally, but never seems to think that there's anything in it. Once in a great while when there's a disc in, it might prompt me to boot from it when I turn it on, but still won't show anything there in Windows.

I deleted/reinstalled it in the device manager, to no real avail. Then I moved on and just learned to live with it... until recently when my computer caught some pretty vicious malware that seems beyond undoing at this point. Google says it's some variety of Vundo. Ad-Aware and Google's Spyware thing couldn't catch it, and Symantec's removal tool wasn't up to it either. I went in and deleted a bunch of shady stuff from my registry by hand but it didn't really do much good. System Restore was shut off when I ran the tool, so there aren't any restore points to go back to. I've backed up my files and I just want to reformat the whole thing... but to do this I need a working CDROM to boot from.

I thought maybe the drive itself was broken, so I unplugged it and plugged in a different CDROM drive, only to discover that it won't even turn on without its own drive plugged in. So I tried having both plugged in, but then both drives behaved in the same weird way...

Any suggestions are appreciated.

Miss mah bucket.

 

read and run me first
You have a series of problems going on. I think first you need to get rid of the Malware. After the malware removal post back and someone should be able to assist you with the diagnoses.
Just a quick question have you tried to clean the cdrom with a cd disk cleaner

 

Okay so I'm a n00b. I didn't think that the Malware could be affecting my hardware in such a way, but after going through the Read & Run, the problem managed to fix itself... Crisis averted.

 

Malware no longer shocks me, I've learned that it can affect all kinds of stuff you would never realize could be affected. Glad it fixed the problem.