dvd rw not detected

Hi,

I hope someone can help me with a few issues I am having with my dvd rw drive...

Some while ago I had to battle a rootkit virus, and at that critical time my dvd rw stopped working. Before that, it was working perfect.

The system seems to be clean as far as I know, but of course I don't know if I am sitting with a compromised system now though.

The problem is that my system does not detect my dvd rw properly. And I am confused beyond belief. I have tried so many fixing alternatives through browsing the web and forums, registry tweaks, installing and uninstalling devices, going into bios etc, but nothing has worked for me. Firmware upgrade doesn't work either since they don't detect my device.

-If the system happens to detect the drive, it is still not able to read any cds.

-sometimes it is detected at boot up and at other times it is not, even though it is set as a first boot device

-sometimes when it is detected, it is visible my computer, but not in device manager

-if it is visible as a device in device manager, it shows up with weird spelling and weird characters. (and the device manager always says the drive is functioning properly).

-sometimes it just dissappear randomly

-and common to everything, even if it does show up, it shows up as a cd drive with no recording capabilites and it is never able to read any cds.

System is win xp pro
DVD RW drive is a NEC ND-3550A
motherboard: MSI K8N Master2-FAR (MS-9620)
4x Opteron
4 GB RAM
Western Digital Caviar HD

my ide in device manager show these:

NVIDIA nforce4 serial ATA Controller
NVIDIA nforce4 serial ATA Controller
primary ide
secondary ide
standard dual channel pci ide

does that look right? can something be done by installing and uninstalling these, I have not tried that because just right now I can't risk an unbootable system.


I really hope someone can give some clues as to what to try inorder to solve this issue.

Many Thanks
Mike