I recently rebuilt an older PC with 2 DVD burner drives in it, and gave it to our daughter and son-in-law. It uses WinXP Home, and has around 6 poeple that use it in the household, including one teenage boy who has bunches of iPod apps on it.

During an Excel (standalone, not MS Office) install, they noted that the second CD wouldn't continue the installation. I haven't seen the computer, but apparently both DVD drives have disappeared from "My Computer", and in DM both have exclamation marks. Our son-in-law knows nothing about computers, but had tried to "Reinstall Driver", and got the "error code 19" and "error code 41", one of the errors for each drive.

I see that the MS site has an article on this, and relates it to apps such as "Nero" that manage CD/DVD writing, but the fix involves registry editing, and I know if they try that then it'd anyone's guess what the computer will or won't do afterwards

Is there any info here on what causes the errors, and any fixes that don;t require registry editing?

Thanks- Bruce.

Some DVD-burners don't like it if they are placed as Slave. Try unplug the Slave DVD burner and try again. Your son-in-law should be able -by you guiding him over the phone- to remove the power connector from the Slave DVD-burner.

Dude

I've personally never experienced your code 19 & 41 problems; however, I Goggled the problem and here is the link: WinXP code 19 & 41error fix

As far as regedit use goes, if your kid(s) can walk and chew gum simultaneously then, they can manipulate the registry by following step-by-step instructions. Give'em a 'lil credit

Set one to master and the other to slave or try using cable select for the jumper pin settings on the back of the drive. I do alot of dvd burning and have Nero Ultra 7 installed but not the InCd component of it as it can interfere with other burning programs. Try the clean tool below, then try reinstalling the drivers for it, if it still fails then the operating system drivers could have got deleted or corrupted, if thats the case you may want to think about doing a format and recover of the hard drive, pain in the but but its a great way to clean up your hard drive and fix problems.
Also here is a link on how to fix a DMA problem but it shows how to uninstall the drivers.

http://www.nero.com/nero6/enu/Clean_Tools.html

http://forum.lgsoftwareinnovations [...] hp?t=12650

Thanks TPLAT

Reformatting is a bummer, it's only been reformatted 2 weeks ago . It worked well when it left here, but there's some curse in that household- there are 4 supposedly defunct computers there already, and now a 5th has joined them (at least as regards the DVD drives).

I don't know if nero is installed or not, they could have installed anything on it. Our grandson has an iPod, and uses "LimeWire" (sp?) among who knows what else to download music and videos. He installed it here OK and used these apps, but as I say who knows what got installed later after it left here.

Say- aren't the DVD drivers native to XP, so should reinstall? I still think I want to do the registry changes mentioned above in this thread, I might try to walk one of them through it.

Thanks- Bruce.

If the drivers didnt get corrupted, uninstalling them then restarting your pc will automaticly reinstall the drivers, its actualy pretty easy to do, sometimes it does help with drive problems. It gives the drives a fresh install becuase after their uninstalled and you restart your pc Windows will see the drive(s) as new hardware and automaticly install the drivers for them. Uninstalling the driver is different then deleting them. check out the DMA link in my above post, it shows how to uninstall the drivers. Another thing I would look for on the pc would be a virtual drive, I never liked those as they can cause problems with other software.