Can anyone help me please i've had my burner for a year now and it was working sweet up on till yesterday. went to burn a cd and got an error sign saying drive is in use. so i went and checked it out. the drive now thinks it's a standard cd/dvd rom drive not a dvdrw drive. i have installed old firmware and new. reboot the computer reinstalled windows xp home. and still nothing. i have even made a flash faliure and repaired it just to see if it would help.

im at my witts end here last thing i want to do is go and by a new dvd burner ..

did you try to uninstall the writer in the device manager then reboot?
It might get re-detected as dvd writer.
might try try to uninstall the ide channel the writer
is connected to if that doesnt work.

i've tryed that and still nothing. so i did a wee test i removed the dvdrw and put in my old cdrw drive and its the same as the dvdrw. keeps saying its a cd rom drive. i dont know what to do it looks like its the computer but i reinstalled windows xp ???????

did you remove the writer then uninstall the ide channel the writer was connected to?

i figured that would work. kind of like resets the ide channel.

then install the writer..

still nothing keeps coming up as cd-rom drive this is killing me now ready to stick the boot into this computer lol

well you could install either drive(the dvd writer or the cd writer) on another computer then youd know for sure if it was your computer.

think thats the next thing to do then.
thanks for the help i'll keep at it

ok it was my ide port. its dead have to get a new motherboard now. thanks for the help rmf

an ide controller card will cost less then a new motherboard look at "ide controllers the definitive thread" in general hardware forum

hmm... did you check ide in the BIOS?
was the device detected in the BIOS?
i would think that if the ide port was dead the device would not be detected at all.