I can't believe that someone reading this doesn't know why my cd rom drives are not in "my computer" all at one and are in the device manager with a yellow exclamation mark beside both of them.

Plz give more details about your setup.
Where are your drives attached to?
How are they configured (master, slave?)?
Which ide channel do they share if they do?
Plz help us to help you!

Drives?

Have you just installed a new CDRom? And presumably kept the old one.

1. Make sure that there are no more than two devices on each IDE cable (long flat grey ribbin cable).

2. Make sure on the IDE cable that the edge with the red line is nearest the power connector on both the drives, it can be the other way round if the cable is plugged in to the motherboard the other way!

3. The drives have jumpers in which you can remove and plug in to the separate rows of pins not part of the IDE socket. They will probably be marked MA/SL/CA and their will most likely be a sticker on the top highlighting this. On each grey cable (or IDE channel as its known) one drive should be Master (MA) and the other must be Slave (SL). You can't have both being the same, unless one is connected to the other grey cable.

Try changing a jumper in one of the drives from master-to-slave or vice-versa.

4. Make sure the cables are correctly inserted, and agligned properly so that there aren't any pins showing at the edges

Check this out for a graphical help...
http://techadvice.com/support/atlas/atlas_cdrom-drive_install.htm

I kinda of have the same problem but its relativaley infrequent. Sometimes all of a sudden my CDR drive just disappears from
explorer and i have to reboot for it to come back. Its really infrequent so i don't worry about it. I have a Yamaha SCSI 4206 cdr with a 2 year old adaptec scsi card, just thought i would mention it.

Could be that you're cables aren't working properally - I assume that you're scsi card doesn't have a built in Bios - mine does, and occasionally it used to fail to recognise certain devices upon initialisation. I solved the problem by replacing my old scsi cables - it transpired that the wires were no longer providing a reliable connection to the drives.

Okay..Nothing has changed for many months on the hardware side...Here is what I have...I dual-boot Win98 and Win2000 and have for months..My configuration is and has been Ultra 66 controller that controls both hard drives and both slave cd rom drives..That has worked well and worked fast for many months..I was burning a rom an my cd rom burner and when I finished burning it my cd rom burner and my regular cd rom was gone in "My Computer"..They are still in "Device Manager" but have the exclamation marks with yellow circles around the exclamation marks..
Nothing has changed. The computer hasn't even been opened in 6 months..Strangest darn things happen..I even tried re-installing windows 2000 last night over the top of existing to see if that would change it..No change...I am out of answers except to format the drive and start from scratch..I hate to because I lose all my months of setting everything up. I even d/led Ultra 66 newest drivers and bios and put those on last night just for the heck of it and still nothing ..Maybe the ZDTV man could help.haha.
Thanks.

appreciate any more input..

Hi !

I've read posts about this a couple of weeks ago.

Go to Windows Update and reinstall all the fixes once again (not IE5.5 beta), worked for them...

/ Toby

well!
I was like HUH! when i read this.
My provider told me that this controller u have doesnt support CD-Roms.
That could be the prob :-)
I dont know.
If u r 100% sure that it does Plz let me know.

Kux
----------------
Have phun

Lynn - it is true that the manufacturers (Promise and Highpoint) recommend putting atapi devices on the regular controllers if they exist. If you don't have an ata33 controller (i.e. have a camino chipset or newer via or amd chipset mobo) then delete the cdrom and have it redetected. I have seen that happen when I have messed with the cd burner drivers (one of which may be corrupt) or if 2 incompatible burning apps have been installed. Delete the cdrom and see how it is redetected. If that doesn't work, run an repair reinstall and see if that works. One other idea would be reinstalling your burner apps (you didn't say which ones you are using).


Shrink

Maybe the controller on one of the Cdroms has died or "partially" died. The reason I say this is because I've been through 2 keyboards, and 2 CDroms that for some reason decided they stopped working on my PC, yet when tested on other PC's they worked fine.

A while back I had a Creative 24mx CDROM that decided it would only work if it was set to master and there was no slave connected. Yet before it threw a wobbly it had been happy and content with its other harddrive friend.

Sadly I had to give it up for adoption in another PC, and pay for a new baby to be smuggled in from Romania; Err, I mean Taiwan.

Im with the last guy, this is definitely a hardware problem. Win 98 or Win2k dont even care if the software for the burners are installed they will still see them and recognize them as cdrom's. I would definitely start with the esay things first like replacing cables and I am leaning towards the problem being with the controller on the mobo being flaky.

Ive only seen this once b4 and thats when a guy had his cpu massively overclocked causing the speed of the bus to be out of whack as well. The drives and the controller can sometimes have probs with these speeds.

I appreciate all you advice..I finally gave up and formatted the drive and re-installed windows 2000. All is well after the format and re-install. It was just one of those nightmare things.
Thanks again.