I am trying to repair a problem for a friend. He has a Dell Vostro 200 computer with Vista 32 installed. It was working fine until suddenly he could not access his DVDROM. Always got a message saying Please insert a disk in the drive when you viewed it in Windows Explorer. Device Manager sees the drive and gives its model number, etc. Says it is not working and gives the error message 39 file corrupt or missing. It will not see CDs or DVDs. He has not installed any new software or done anything unusual. It is a SATA drive and I pulled the connectors out of the drive and re-inserted them. I went on-line to Dell and downloaded the Dell driver for that specifc drive and it won’t install; says it can’t find the drive. We bought an external USB connected drive and while it is also seen in Device Manager, it also gives the error 39 file corrupted or missing message. We tried renaming the cdrom.sys in the system32 folder in order to force the systmm to reinstall a driver on re-boot, but the system will not let us do anything to that file. I did drop the UAC to zero and rebooted but that did not help on the renaming.We can’t format and re-install the operating systm since the DVDROM is not working. I am assuming that the SATA port on the motherboard is o.k. since device manager at least sees the drives.
Any other suggestions? Any hope?
Thanks.
