USB DVD-RW's disappeared.

[F.V.H]

Hello.

This is my first post, and I hope that there is help to be found.

It's a long story, but please bear with me.

Like so many others I got fed up with the incredible noise from my computer. So I got the "bright" idea to put the tower out in the staircase, which is adjacent to my study. I drilled a hole in the wall behind my desk just big enough to get the DVI-connector through. This worked like a dream - I just shut the door and enjoyed working in total silence. Then I started missing having the DVD-roms in the vicinity, so I bought two IDE to USB controllers and removed my two DVD-burners from the tower. I used some band-it to attach them under my desktop and connected them via the USB-controllers to two of the USB ports on the other side of the wall. And it worked just fine. Both turned up in My Computer just as they've done when they were connected via the IDE-cables within the cabinet. All well.
By the way, the burners are a BENQ DW1655 and a NEC 3500.
I was running XP professional at the time, and after a while I decided to give Vista x64 a try. I formatted the PC and installed Vista x64. All worked fine for a while until I noticed that my BENQ and NEC had dissappeared from My Computer - they were nowhere to be found. I couldn't burn anything (NERO) because the software couldn't find anything to burn with.

I thought that it had something to do with the OS, so I formatted again and reinstalled the XP I had previously. But still no DVD-rom's. I took one of them - the BENQ - and put it back on the IDE cable, and that worked. But the other, which still is connected to the IDE to USB controller is still gone. I've tried most anything - changed cables, tried all the USB-ports available etc, but to no use.

Here's a couple of things I can tell that might have something to do with this problem. During that time I downloaded the latest beta-BIOS (F9b) from Gigabyte for my GA-P35-DQ6 rev. 1.0. I also tried a few versions of Daemon Tools, but I've always had Daemon installed before and the USB DVD-roms were still there in addition to any virtual CD-rom from Daemon.

Then I started looking for the missing DVD-rom in the device-manager. Under the DVD/CD-tab is just my BENQ (which is connected via the IDE-cable) and a SCSI-drive called YX9251I EVS142Y SCSI Cdrom device.

The USB-drive (the NEC 3500), however, can be found as a "USB Device" under the discs-tab.

Why has my computer all of a sudden started recognizing the USB DVD-ROM's as only "USB Devices" when I need them to be recognized as burner devices?

I really hope that someone can help me with this.

Thank you for your time.

Regards, Frode in Norway.

 

[oldskool]

I noticed that it changed for you when you went to Vista 64-bit. It seems to be reconginizing your USB controllers but not that NEC drive itself. And I also noticed that after you formatted and reinstalled XP they were not detected as burners either. Maybe that firmware is part of the problem .... hhmmm

I don't have any suggestion other than maybe to try another known working drive and see what happens, to see if the OS will detect it. I'm sure one of the resident experts here can help. I honestly don't know what to tell ya other than to try a known working drive, since you already tried one thing I would have done, which was to go back to XP Pro. Good luck, I hope it turns out ok for you, Frode.

 

[F.V.H]

Thank you for that, oldskool.

Yes, I sincerely hope that someone is able to help me with this.
I've googled the problem and tried for quite a while to find a remedy for the problem, but my PC keeps on insisting to recognize my USB-converted IDE-drives simply as USB-devices. Which, of course, is pretty useless.

When the setup was working, the little icon in the right bottom corner of the screen - the "remove hardware safely" icon - reported them by letters (i.e. (H and (I, but now only as "mass storing device(s)" without any assigned letter(s).

Thanks again.