Need Advice CD-ROM drive not recognized

When DH & I tried to upgrade Norton AV on our laptop this afternoon, the CD wouldn't read. The in-use light on the side of the drive lit up for about 10 seconds when the drive door was closed, but nothing else happened. Opened System Tools, and the drive doesn't even exist in Device Manager anymore. It was last used several weeks ago when DH ripped some music CDs onto his MP3 player. This is a Windows XP system, by the way. What's the first step to figuring this out?

 

OK, we found the solution -- uninstall the old version of NAV, reboot, and the drive magically "reappears" -- but don't understand what could have happened.

 

solution is. dont use norton

 

seriously thouigh. norton is garbage. with all those automatic updates and stuff. id pick mcafee over norton but i wouldnt pick either of them. there are a few other not so popular ones that are 10x better

i had a vundo virus last week mcafee only detected couldnt remove. i had to manualy remove it, not a hard job but still whats the point of having a anti virus if it can only detect and not remove EVERYTHING

 

I use bit defender 2008 and it works great and is not that expensive.

qzpmal

 

Thanks for the suggestions! We've been using Norton for so long that it's just habit. Whatever happened to F-prot?

 

Unfortunate update: the drive has "disappeared" again, after completely uninstalling Norton. Could it be that the drive is going bad?

 

yes or a bad install of windows

 

which one would you pick? my mom played some casino game on mylap top and i have some adware/spyware/crapware that is sticking even when we try to manually remove it- it just comes back. would love suggestions!

 

• Run the Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool. See Instructions.
• Run a full system virus scan with something other than your normal program:
  • A free solution online is Symatenc Security Check - choose the Virus Detection option.
• Run a full system spywre scan with something other than your normal program:
  • SUPERAntiSpyware is known to detect many variants of Vundo, and has a free version.
  • Spybot S&D is a well-known free solution.

You can use the McAfee online virus scan to identify the infection. Then google the names of the virus/spyware you have for in-depth instructions on removing it.

 

I have found that if you use apps to remove some malicious software it just reloads when you reboot. Best trick is to load Spybot S&D and set it to run the next time you boot up and then reboot. This will catch the malicious code before it loads. Took me two hours to figure that out.

qzpmal