i just got my computer hooked up after moving. the cd drive wont work now. checked all the connections and they are all looking good. i figured the drive took a dump so what better time to upgrade to a dvd burner. bought a hp dvd writer with lightscribe. cant get it to work either. when i go into my computer it shows the floppy drive but not the cd drive. if all the connections are plugged in right ( they are ) what else could cause the problem. the drive has power as the tray goes in and out and the green light flashes. i have a guy that can look at it saturday but if i can get this figured out sooner all the better. thanks for any ideas

You might try looking in your bios settings to see if both ide controllers are set to auto. Depending on the brand of computer you will have to press del or the f1 key to enter setup. Usually pn the main screen it will show primary master,primary slave, secondary master, and secondary slave. Set these to auto. Also check the jumper setting on the drives. If both hard drive and dvd are set to master the dvd will not show up, unless the dvd drive is on the secondary ide controller. Then make sure it is on the end of the cable with the ju,per set to master. If it shares a cable with the hard drive set the jumper to slave. Hope this helps.

1983shorty
You can delete the upper and lower filters from the registry.
If you are unfamiliar with editing the registry then you may want to wait for your tech friend to assist.
If this is your issue then when you go into device manager and look at the cd drive entry you will see one of the error codes mentioned in the article.
I also noticed that they have a guided help on this issue now.
I do not have any expierence with the guided help feature listed but it does appear interesting.
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=314060

if that last two suggestions don't help, it is entirely possible (but not so likely) that one of your IDE controllers could be fried. You might try to set the jumpers on the back of the CDROM correctly as a slave, then run it off the same IDE chain as the hard drive. if it works on the primary IDE chain with the HDD, this would suggest to me that your secondary IDE chain is shot.