Serious problems with.....registry?

I recently began having a very serious problem with my Inspiron 1150 Dell laptop. Windows refused to detect my Cd drive and gave me an error code 41 in the device manager. I looked up the defenition for a code 41 error and I read that code 41 involved a burn circuit. That puzzled me because if there was a burnt circuit, the devie itself wouldn't open or even spin the cd, which it did every time i put a cd in there. This caused me to believe that windows itself was detecting an error that really didn't exist. I went online and read in a similar forum that i should try reinstalling the original drivers from the DELL Drivers and Utilities cd that came with my laptop. I plugged in a sony portable cd drive and, suprisingly, received an error message with that device. I checked my device manager and it displayed an error code 19 which i read means that there is an error in the registry with the drivers of the device. I troubleshooted the error and reinstalled the drivers for my portable cd drive. Same exact problem occured. I then tried a different portable cd drive. This time a brand new iomega device. I received the same exact message. I bought PC tool's Registry Mechanic and ran that and fixed all errors it detected. That sadly was a waste of money because it didn't do anything to help me. I have been led to believe that I am experiancing what a friend of mine called a "Windows meltdown" which has to do with the registry deleting important parts. I am in a very desperate situation because i cannot afford to be away from my laptop for longer than2 hours. Thus I am not capable of giving it to DELL or to a service man to look at. I need all the help I can get. Thank you for all the future posts. I hope I can resolve my problem.

~ Alex, a desperate man

 

Oh yeah....I am running Windows XP professional. I have a Celeron processor and my cd drive on the laptop is a QSI CDRW/DVD SBW242U.

 

Same problem

The os could not see cd/rom.

I stuck a bootable xp nes os in the drive..rebooted and woola..unfortunatly I lost everything and your post is over a year old.

 

And you replied to a year old post!