What to do when you can't get drivers
 

So, I'm home for fall break. Dad's old '98 machine needs a facelift on the order of W2k. Everything is going great until I go to get drivers for his DVD and CD-RW drives. They are both creative labs drives. (12x DVD Encore and Blaster 8432 respectively). I find out the CL doesn't make drivers for the CD-RW and all they have for the DVD is a beta driver with a broke installer. I'm stuck... is there anything I can do or am I just screwed?

Did you try http://www.driverguide.com ? They have drivers for damn near anything and everything. Also, about the broken installer on the beta driver, do you have the .inf files? If so, you can manually update the drivers without using it.

why would you need drivers for cd-rw and dvd-rom, can't recall any time I installed cd/dvd drive drivers for any OS and that's probably why Creative Labs doesn't have any

The Generics don't work?

It doesn't sound like you need drivers but more like you want the software that creative provides to use these drives.

I.e. for the cdrw, i'm sure that windows detected it but maybe you mean that you need a program that supports the drive to burn with. If this is the case try using something like nero http://www.nero.com

And if for the dvd drive a quick search led me to the fact that you have the dxr3 decoder board that you need drivers for. I remember when this card first came out so what you are looking for is the realmagic hollywood + drivers as mentioned here ( http://www.digitalleisure.com/support/dxr3.html ). Here is the link for the win2k drivers for the card ( http://www.sigmadesigns.com/support/...us_win2000.htm ) let us know if this is solved your problem.

Windows detected them both, but only as vanilla CD drives... I'll check out the stuff you gave me and see if it works.

Thanks!