Disc Drive Difficulties Under XP
 

System specs: Asus A7V, 1-Ghz T-bird, 128 ram, GeForce 2

I've used Win98se on my system for several years now and hadn't had much difficulty. However, I'd attempted to install both XP and 2000 and had problems. Half-way through installation, my CD drives (Plexwriter 12/10/32 and Pioneer DVD) stopped being recognized. This presented a problem since the CD had files necessary to complete the installation. However, I managed a workaround by copying the files over to the hard drive. Everything installed fine from that point. Today though, I noticed that neither disc drive shows up anywhere in XP. The detection's supposed to be automatic, and it doesn't seem to list either drive under manual installation. Anyone got any idea what I'm doing wrong?

As a side question...XP takes a ridiculous amount of time to boot. It gives me the "Loading" screen and then takes at least fives minutes with a completely black screen (and no immediately detectable activity) before finally loading.

Thanks for any suggestions.

XP needs more RAM that might be causing the slow boots, but your whole install sounds fucked.

Sounds like it's time to format and install Xp from scratch.

I ran into the same issue a few months ago when I downchecked my machine. Weirdest fucking thing. But another fomat reinstall of XP and everything was golden.

That's the thing...it did the same thing when I tried to cleanly install 2000 and XP last summer. Halfway through the installation, it'd ask me to provide the CD. I'd browse, but no CD drives would show up. This workaround of copying the CD to the hard drive seemed to get me through the install and everything else is great, but if I tried a clean install, I'm pretty sure the same thing would happen again. I'm not sure if I need to try swapping around the CD-RW and DVD or whatever. Just weird that they show up fine in the BIOS and then Windows won't recognize them.

I suppose I'll pick up more RAM tomorrow and see if that speeds up the load and/or fixes the problem.

Might want to check the temperature of your machine... summer is coming to a close so it's probably not that hot, but where I live it can get pretty hot, and my ambient case temperature can get really high. In particular, my DVD drive seems to get pretty hot when used quite a bit, and then it starts crapping out.

In any case, try booting up with safe mode or boot logging turned on to see what drivers are loading on startup. For Win2K/XP, it'll list the drivers as they are loaded, so you can see which one is giving you a hard time.

I don't know how comfortable you are poking into your case but, I would suggest opening your case and checking to make sure that the ide cables are plugged in properly, i tsounds like they might be loose and after your computer has warmed up, the connection is just "off" enough to stop detecting your drives during the install. Other then that also check the master/slave jumpers on both drives.

I do not recommend playing with the jumpers if you aren't comfortable opening your case, but just pushing cables back into the connectors should be somewhat easy (but be warned that there are lots of cables).

I'm comfortable opening up my case. I built the machine myself.

And, the CD drives had no problem running under Windows 98, so that suggests that temperature and the connection shouldn't be the problem.

It's just weird that it would start installing the OS fine (and could copy all of the files off fine before the installation), but then during the middle just says it can't find the drives. And still can't find them.

I had the exact same problem with the same damn board....anytime I tried to install windows 2000 or xp the drive would disappear in the middle of the installation. All you have to do to fix it is to flash it to the newest version of the bios and it will work perfectly :)

Awesome. Thank you so much. It's been gnawing at me for days now. You've restored my sense of faith in computers. =)