DVD & CD drive unplug themselves??????

Guys, I am at my wits end on this one. My DVD quite seeing dvd's and would only see cd's last week. Now, both the DVD player and my cd-rw unplug themselves about 5 minutes after boot up and are useless.

I have done driver updates, reinstalled, virus scans, motherboard updates, reformatted with another hard drive and it keeps doing the same thing. Changed IDE cables, no help........the only thing that temporary helps at all is if I manually unplug the drives from the motherboard, shutdown, plug them back in and restart, then my system will see them for about 5 minutes and then unplugs both.
WHAT THE HECK IS GOING ON????

Oh yeah, my printer is also on the blink and I have found no logical reason for this either. I have tried all the sensible options with no results on this one either.

SYSTEM: AMD Athelon 1 Gig, Aopen motherboard, Windows 2000 Pro, Pioneer DVD, Adaptec CD-RW, ATI 9800, S.B. 5.1 Platinum, HP All in one Printer.

Desperate
Ron

have you checked ur power supply? maybe there isn't enough juice for all of your devices and windows is shutting them down. though i dont even know if windows does this

yeah im having the same problem with my dvd-rom thingy as ranger ron.my computer reads mine for like 5 minutes and then nothing.

In many cases bizarre behavior is caused by a power supply that is going bad.

yay to get better responses, you should tell what kind of psu u have (stock or better) and its wattage

My system is about 4 yrs old and my power supply failed about 1 yr ago, I replaced it with a new one, an L&C 115/230V from a local Mom/Pop PC Business. The case is original equipment that is 200W.

I tend to believe that it is not windows causing this problem b/c it happens even when I used a different hard drive that had no OS on it yet. You know how it lists hardware installed in the boot up screens, well my DVD and CD drives were not listed. Only the 2 hard drives show up.

Please keep the ideas coming, I am desperate.............

Thanx
Ron

It could be the power supply (try a new one. buy one and return it the next day if necessary).
It could also be that the drives themselves are having issues. Have you tried putting in a different cd/dvd drive, and seeing if it still disappears? Have you tried the existing drives in another computer? Try switching the channels the hdd and dvd drives are on (in case the ide channel itself is bad).

I will try those ideas today. I have already tried switching the cables, that didn't help. It would be extremely weird if both drives were failing at the same time, don't you think? I am having a friend bring his cd drive over and we will try his in mine.

Thanx

None of my suggestions involved switching cables (replacing old with new). I meant plug the cable the hdd's are on into the socket where the optical drives are currently plugged in, and vice versa. That's investigating if the problem is on the mobo.

OK, I got ya now! I didn't not know you could get away with doing that. I will try that now.

Thanx

I used my buddies cable and switched them as you mentioned and I have the same problem. We are going to install his CD burner next and see what happens...............

This is too weird!! I installed my friends CD-RW that was working in his system, it would not work in mine at all. We installed my dvd player that kept unplugging itself in his and it will not work there either. The rest of my system works great, it just won't let me use my dvd/cd drives.

I am completely stumped again!!!!!!

I welcome any ideas.......

Ron

?( If you set the jumper and cabled correctly,.. )

There's possibility that your PC or wrongly setting might damage CDD. Immediately give the CDD back to your friend.

Then, remove HDD and peripherals, Get Win98bootfloppy, boot from it with CD-ROM support and continue experiment.

(^^;(Calm down, at your pace.)

What settings are you referring to? I am still learning PC hardware. The drives worked great for several years and only now out of the blue are they not working.

It is natural that superficially healthy men suddenly dies, long-run car suddenly act up, and vivid flower suddenly shrink. From what? It may be from a little bit of ill nutrition everyday, ill fuel every supply, and wrong watering, or by too strong sunlight, calmly developed cancer, and so on, all can be from unknown or invisible causes.

You have done nothing wrong to it? Right! You didn't do nothing wrong itself. But you have install and uninstalled something every occasion. Then every time they change the settings, every time they remains its information, registry swells up and up until reinstallation and produces many incompatibility. Software uses devices quite selfishly, like the mad or sane brain which don't mind bodily health.