Ask Dave Taylor: Tech and Business

Tuesday

How can I fix my HP CDROM drive problems?

While visiting a friend's office today he asked my advice regarding a problem with his HP 7100 Workstation. He runs Windows XP Professional. The problem revolves around his CD/DVD drive. The hardware manager shows the drive as connected and operating and reading/writing CD-ROMs works fine. However, when a DVD is inserted the drive refuses to even recognize that a disk is inserted ... prompts 'Please insert a disk in drive D:'

I ran the HP On line diagnostics they provide for this machine which tests read and write performance only at CD level and no discrepancies come up. HP does not list a replacement driver on their support site. My guess is that there is some additional software required to get the drive to recognize the DVD feature, but I have no idea where to start looking. Have you run into a situation like this before?


The HP 7100 Workstation is an older machine that didn't ship with XP (which it's now running) so this suggests the machine has been upgraded. What you're seeing is that quite often, when you upgrade Windows, the OS can change the drive letters from the default, which, as you are seeing, causes all sorts of recognition problems.

To change it back...