DVD Drives - both out of action

For some bizzare reason both of my DVD drives have become unusable ..




I did have a set of Starforce drivers present but have now removed these. Although to be fair, the drives had become inactive before removing Starforce.

They do show up in the POST boot sequence as well as the BIOS.

They are no longer listed in My Computer device list though.
I have a couple of firware patches for the drives but they fail because they cannot see the devices.

Things I have tried:

1) Device Manager - uninstall drives and restart
2) Device Manager - Update driver
3) Device Manager - Rollback driver
4) Windows update

Last effort is to System Restore. Any ideas?

Cable loose or faulty?

Since they're recognized in the BIOS and you've had Starforce installed at some time, I'd suspect Starforce has busted them, somehow. No idea how to resolve this though, sorry.

I did have Starforce for some time (mainly to try the Trackmania demos) and the drives were ok then. They seemed to have both crapped out at the same time but I don't know why. I'll investigate the cables as a "process of ellimination" routine.
I have removed TrackMania and Starforce drivers as a matter of principle now.

Something to do with bus mastering perhaps? Check the drives are not running in 16bit mode, and try reinstalling the motherboard drivers.

Alternatively contact a solicitor and sue the very essense of life out of the people who wrote Starforce until they leave us all alone!

do a search for this issue on the microsoft knowledge base. There's a quirk in windows xp that causes dvd drives to stop working in this manner.

Try the drive on another PC?
Format PC?

Fixed it. I had installed Norton Ghost which in itself installed GEARSec.exe. This particular piece of software seemed to have taken control of the CD/DVD drives.
Having kicked GEAR out of my system it decided to go down guns blazing buggering up the drives on its way out.
Because of that, Norton Ghost has now been served an eviction notice. The drives are back in operation.

Thanks coders.

I must say though, I'm having a hard time trusting software recently. All they seem to be insterested in is installing third-party pap which mangles your system.

Personally, I don't trust any software with 'Norton' in the title. :)

I had a right carry on with Norton Anti Virus several years ago and will never be letting anything by Mr. Norton anywhere near my PC ever again, as a result. :/

Dr Norton is no longer involved in the Norton products and hasn't been for at least a decade. He sold up the first chance he got because he doesn't like microprocessor based systems, he's a mainframe kinda guy.

I'd just like to make clear that although i'm defending the man, i'm in no way defending the Norton products, which are aweful and responsible for more system crashes than they have ever saved or resolved.

A case of "we need a product to fullfill this market, make something" rather than "hey I found if I do this I can make things better, I wonder if people will buy it."

lol. I didn't think Mr. (Dr?) Norton was actually personally responsible for writing all the Norton software. I just used the term 'Mr. Norton' as a simple way of referring to that company's 'product' range. :)