Optical drives disappearing in Win XP

I forgot to point out, one tried to install a patch and 1/2 way received the error message (and i paraphrase) *this requires 32bit file system* how can we check to see if the OEM installed winxp home as fat16 or is this something different altogether?

Can try the usual routine which includes:
Rollback driver to see if that works. If not do a re-install of device. Make sure your system is not the problem by doing the standard disk cleaning, scandisk, defrag, empty temp files, scan for viruses and spyware. If none of that works maybe should make sure the port is not bad, make sure everything seated properly in system, connections tight etc.

The first thing I would check is in Computer Management under Administrator Tools, I would see if you can see the drives there, and if so, make sure it is assigned a drive letter which does not conflict with anything else. This is also a common cause of problems with Jump Drives "disappearing"

I encountered a similar problem where the CDROMs would disappear but Device manager did show that there was a problem. I had tried refreshing drivers, swapping cdroms...ended up reimaging the 1st i saw it. Finally looked it up and found this article: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;320553

Basicly there is a reg key you have to delete. Goto HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/System/CurrentControlSet/Control/Class/{4d36e965-e325-11ce-bfc1-08002be10318}

and delete the upperfilters and lowerfilters entries. Should be REG_MULTI_SZ data types. I only had the upperfilter showing and removed it, rebooted and the cdrom was working normally afterwards.

Might give this a try.

AS ALWAYS...Working with the registry can be dangerous. You may want to back up the registry or at least the Reg key here before making changes. That said I have not had any problems(yet) deleting the upperfilters entry.

hth,
Jason

With XP you only have two options for the HDD File Settings one is FAT 32 and the other is NTFS.

If they currently have FAT 32 File Tables I would convert these to NTFS via the start run and enter in [b]convert C:/ FS: NTFS[/b]

If the OS is intact and working correctly this will make it easier to ix any problems that you run into.

Col

I would be interested in hearing the answer to this also, as I have a friend who's using XP, and their cd drive sporadically disappears from "My Computer" and only reappears on rebooting the machine... Tried replacing the cd drive, but same thing... So it's not the drive... Somehow, windoze just seems to lose track of it after it's been running for a little while... The drive still has power, as the tray opens and closes... Changing cables, and putting it on the same ide adapter as the hard drive, or putting it on the secondary adapter by itself also has no effect... Gets pretty annoying to have to reboot to find the cd drive when ya wanna play a cd... lol... Especially if it was there ten minutes before and you just played music on it...