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

Re: :P

[exilejedi.livejournal.com]

Sorry for the flip comment earlier... My overall experience with PC hardware is that unless you carefully hand-select the components you use -- and even sometimes when you do -- it's largely an unending sea of misery and disappointment. On the other hand, I've spent about 15 years around Macs and the only significant hardware problem I ever encountered was a series of bad Zip drives (not the manufacturer's fault, it was during the great "click of death" fiasco). They are also generally mom-friendly.

Good luck.

Re: :P

[eirias.livejournal.com]

Thanks... ordinarily sarcasm is appreciated, but life with my mom is, er, a little trying these days ;).

I've actually not had good luck with Macs - it seems to be a singular ability of mine to get them to crash. Nothing as bad as hardware trouble, though.

Re: :P

[exilejedi.livejournal.com]

Given your description of your mom's reaction, I gathered that things were a little wacky.

MacOS 7-9 were rather crashy due to their lack of protected memory, but OSX is a rock. It really takes some effort to upset it.

Still... good luck.