CD/DVD & Floppy Drives all dead

[amjervis]

Im really stuck! All of a sudden my CdRW drive, DVD drive and my floppy drive have all stopped working! They are all shown in device manager, light up when I try to use them but give a this drive is not formatted meassage. Anyone got any ideas? Im running Windows 2000 as an OS, and have recently upgraded my Antivirus to Norton 2005, firewall to Zone Alarm pro. Thanks in advance for ur help!

[Alfons]

Pull them all out and add a known-good floppy drive, see if that works. If yes, then try with your floppy - I suspect it may be "broken".

Now add a known-good CD Drive of some kind to test the IDE Controller, and if that works, add one of your drives to see if it works, then try the other - you may also have one of these "broken".

Both FDDs and CD Drives can be recognized by the BIOS and by Windows and still be faulty - the BIOS & Windows only interrogates each device to see if they're on-line and what they are, and each device is limited in what it can test itself for, so until you actually put a disk into the device, you don't know whether it can read or write.