Unrelated thing: Disappearing CD-RW

[eirias]

Today I was mucking about with trying to set up a tiny LAN here with my laptop and my mom's PC. In doing this, some kind of Miniport adapter bridge installed itself, presumably due to the Network Wizard. Good, I thought, less work I'll have to do.

Couldn't get the networking to work, so I thought I'd copy the XP wizard onto a CD-RW and move it to my Win2K box, as it had suggested I do. And then I noticed - the CD-RW drive doesn't seem to exist. It's not listed in the device manager and nothing happens when you try to open the drive.

I don't know whether this is some bizarre result of my network mucking or not; I don't see how it would be, but Windows works in mysterious ways. Right now I'm scanning for viruses, as I know there's at least one virus out there that makes drives disappear. Has anyone else seen anything like this? Does anyone have advice?

Comments

[exilejedi.livejournal.com]

I had a couple of different Creative Labs CD drives that were really unresponsive to button presses. They would only open/close when they were good and ready -- sometimes you'd have to wait 10+ seconds, other times it would just ignore the eject press. I sometimes had more luck in getting those drives open during a reboot situation, when there was no OS/no drivers loaded that might be causing issues.

But yeah, if there are no blinky lights, then something bad may have happened. It might be as simple as a loose power cable. Or the drive itself could have realized that it's out of warranty and given up the ghost (as hardware is wont to do). A little internal investigation and jiggery-pokery may be in order...