CD-RW problem

Have a Hewlett Packard with the stock CD-RW drive. It stopped working a month or so ago. I've just been doing without, but I was talking to one of our I/S folks at work and he said he'd take a look at it. He's confident the drive's OK. When in the "Device Manager" and the CD-RW icon is clicked, I get a "Windows cannot start this hardware device because its configuration information (in the registry) is incomplete or damaged. I've had instances of viruses being detected--I've had a couple of Trojans and have had to go into Safe Mode to get rid of them. Everything else seems to work pretty good (although it's fairly slow for a 1.3Ghz Celeron). My I/S guy suggested posting for suggestions--said if someone knew the registry line involved it could possibly be fixed without reformatting the hard drive. Anyone out there have any suggestions (it's listed after the icon as an HP CD-Writer cd16f)? Thanks

 

i had a cd prob last week.

It might help to read page 8 here look for the pink face
Terry

 

to defintetly eliminate the cdrw i would take it out and try it in another computer just to be sure .

 

Halo--My OS is XP and the drive has the Yellow ! next to it. The message in quotations in my original post was copied and pasted from the error screen. Didn't try the drive in another PC yet, but we tried reinstalling the driver with no success and having the PC re-recognize the device. I'm taking it back in Monday and we're going to try swapping in another RW drive to see if it works in which case I'll just buy another drive in lieu of redoing the hard drive. My I/S guy is thinking there's a line in the registry that's damaged or has a line in it that shouldn't be there due to a virus, and that maybe someone out in PC land has been able to successfully troubleshoot it. If I have to reinstall windows with the original package I'll probably have to reinstall all of my other software and without the CD-RW to burn all of my data (digital pictures, etc.), it'd be a real pain--trying to avoid that at all costs.

 

It seems to me you need to reinstall the drivers from your cd-rw drive.

 

Went to the HP help center this morning and it downloaded updates. I also received instructions on how to uninstall, reboot and let the system detect the device and re-install the driver----still the same problem. Will proceed with taking it back to my I/S guy to try installing a CD-RW known to be OK. If this works I'll just buy a new drive..........................