It seems that Norton Antivirus has caused a conflict with the dvd/cd rw. I spent 3 hours yesterday with some technician at Symantec who proceeded to mess the whole computer up! I ended up losing all connection with the analyst at Symantec, the computer would only start up in "safe mode" time and time again but eventually I managed to get it to start up normally. They messed with msconfig but again I managed to get that sorted. So I have completely removed Norton and the drive now says dvd-rw but a burner still cannot be detected. I will try unistalling the primarys and secondarys again and see if that has any bearing. The analysts (yes two of them) admitted that Norton was causing a conflict. The first one removed Norton completely cos every 6 days it was flashing a message that it had 15 issues to be fixed and the only way to fix it was to uninstall and reinstall Norton so the analyst installed Norton 360 v.2. It was when he first removed it that the drive suddenly changed from cd-rom to dvd-rw. Yep - thats 3 hours of my life I won't be getting back lol