# drivers gone missing! dell dimension 9100



## newbeee (Feb 10, 2006)

i have a dell dimension 9100 PC with two drives-one sony DVD-ROM drive and one philips DVDRW drive. it was working perfectly fine but then after installing and uninstalling various programs such as roxio, nero, codec packs etc the drives simply vanished from my computer i.e they no longer appear under the my computer tab. im not sure after which installation or uninstallation this occures since i didnt notice the drive was missing till i acually needed it. 

when i went to device manager, the drives appeared there, but they both had yellow exclamation marks next to them, and under properties, it said that the driver was missing or corrupt. i then went to the dell website and downloaded the driver files for both drives that came preinstalled on the computer, but these files are .exe files, and when i run them, they cannot find the drives, so cannot complete installation. 

i have tried various things within the operating system to try and locate a driver so that it works and nothing is helping. 

can anyone help?:4-dontkno


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## Doby (Jan 17, 2006)

If you are running XP go here http://www.aumha.org/regfiles.php

Scroll down to "Restore missing cd patch" download and install the patch but read the important info at the top of the page first and make sure you create a restore point


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## newbeee (Feb 10, 2006)

hi

the drives are now visible and can read any discs that i put in. but when i try to burn a cd within windows media player, it says it cannot find a cd burner, but within the properties of media player under the devices tab, both drives are visible..so why cant it recognise that my cd burner is present?


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## Doby (Jan 17, 2006)

Did you run the patch and is that what made the drives work?


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## newbeee (Feb 10, 2006)

yes that is what made the drives work. they now both appear as usual and both play a cd i inserted. its only when i try to burn in media player that the media player wont recognise that i have a cd burner


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## Doby (Jan 17, 2006)

Does any other burn software work such as nero?


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## newbeee (Feb 10, 2006)

i do not have any burning software installed at the moment since nero was giving me alot of headache and kept crashing all the time so i uninstalled it


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## Doby (Jan 17, 2006)

I am going to have to ask for additional help from one of the software guys, so be patiant till they have a look


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## Zazula (Apr 27, 2006)

1. Please go through this: How to troubleshoot issues that occur when you write data to a CD-R or CD-RW optical disc in Windows XP

2. If all workarounds provided in the article linked above fail, then we'll need to see if this is a WMP or an OD issue (WMP = Windows Media Player, OD = Optical Drive). So download the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools and install them in accordance with their instructions. They contain *Cdburn.exe*, which is an ISO CD-ROM Burner Tool. Now, we'll simply need to find an ISO file to see if it'll finally get burned. If there's no ISO file handy in your computer, then download *mtinst.exe* and run it. When asked, click *Save CD Image to Disk*. A file called *Windiag.iso *will be created. This is what you will use along with *Cdburn.exe*, in order to test the burner capabilities of your ODs.

3. Post back how things went, do not hesitate to ask for further clarifications if needed, and do not forget that the built-in OD recording capabilities of Windows are CD-only; you won't ever be able to burn DVDs.


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## newbeee (Feb 10, 2006)

thts great it worked thanx very very much

u lot are the best


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## Zazula (Apr 27, 2006)

I'm glad you got it sorted out, newbeee - cheers!


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## Doby (Jan 17, 2006)

Great news glad you got it fixed newbeee,

Thank you Zazula for helping us out, good job

Rick


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