when the sony dvd drive on my inspiron 6000 died, i decided to take the consensus recommendation and replace it with a nec nd6500. everything seemed to go well EXCEPT:

1.) the inspiron insists that the dvd drive is still a sony
and
2.) while the nec handles dvd's beautifully under its assumed name, it will have nothing to do with cds.

i'm very much a novice at all this. i was willing to update the drive's firmware, but that is impossible since the inspiron refuses to see the nec drive.

HELP! bill

First let me welcome you to wonderful family of CD Freaks community.

Uninstall the IDE Controller that your nd6500 is cinnected to reboote the system and let the windows install and define the drive.

bgorgo, welcome to the forum!

I don't have an Inspiron, but some laptops have only a single IDE channel with both the harddrive and the optical drive on the same channel.

If you remove the IDE controller or the Primary IDE Channel, and if there is a detection problem at the next boot, you might end up with an unbootable system.

If the Inspiron 6000 has the optical drive on the Secondary IDE Channel, I would try uninstalling only the Secondary IDE Channel and then reboot.

thanks tcas and dragemester-- i uninstalled the secondary IDE channel and i rebooted. sure enough, xp found new hardware-- but not the nec. it's still seeing a sony where there is none. is there any way to tell whether uninstalling the primary IDE channel or the IDE controller will have catastrophic results? i'm running xp home.
thanks again for your responses-- bill

CALL OFF THE HOUNDS! turns out that somehow IMAPI got turned off and switched to manual. switched back on and set to auto and i'm good to go. the inspiron can call the drive whatever it wants, as long as it can take care of business.
thanks again--
bill