Okay, i'm at wits end with my computer. i'm thinking the best course of action is to run it over with my car, but i figured i'd ask for advice here first. i have a dell dimension 8100 P4 2ghz 1gig of ram. 2 HD's (partitioned into 4 drives), a dat drive (don't use this anymore), internal cd-r/cd-rw/dvd-rom, and an external firewire dvd-r drive.
I'm having trouble with my cd-r and dvd-r drives. they both come up in windows explorer. The internal drive is letter H: and the external drive is letter N:. G: is not used,though it used to be the external drive, one day it just became N:. I, J, K, and L are a multi-type flash media redia (CF, etc). drive M: is my ipod. a couple of months ago, everything was working fine. Now, i can see the cd-r and dvd-r drives in windows explorer, but the computer won't read any data off them. if i put a cd or dvd in H:, it recognizes that somehthing is in there but the title of the media no longer appears in windows explorer. when i click on it, it goes to a blank window and does not see the files. Out of nowhere, the other day, it saw the files for a few minutes, then went back to not seeing anything. If i put a cd-r or dvd-r in drive N: nothing happens (the drive spins but that's it). If i try to click on N:, I get the folllowing message:
N:/ is not accessible
The request is not supported
Roxio will not recognize either drive.
discwelder sometimes will burn to dvd-r but not usually.
in the device manager, it says both drives are working properly. according to the device manager, the internal drive is located at Location 0(0); the external drive is located at LUN 0.
what the fuck is going on here? I would prefer not having to do a re-install of windows cause i can't get everything off my HD's since neither drive is working. is there some kind of conflict? should i disconnect some shit and try something? this is a complete pain in the balls. any help is appreciated.
-damon