Physical + Virtual(!) DVD/CD Rom Failure

Yesterday both my DVD-Rom and my CD-Rom disappeared from My Computer. Made sure IDE cables and power cables were plugged in. The BIOS saw both Drives fine.

So I go to Device Manager in Windows XP and not only do my physcial hardware DVD/CD Rom Devices have exclamations marks next to them, but the Daemon Tools Virtual Drive and some other Cequadar Virtual Drive have exclamations marks.

So I was thinking my windows XP had been corrupted somehow. So off I pop to my other partition and run my Windows 2000 OS... and guess what, this has exclamation marks next to the physical and virtual DVD/CD Rom drives as well! So hows that possible - It cant be Software because it happens in both Operating Systems, yet it cant be hardware because a Virtual DVD/CD Rom drive isnt a piece of hardware...

The only thing I remember doing with any DVD/CD related software, was installing CloneCD on Win2k partition and then installing it to the same location in my WinXP partition and it crashed hard, and had to recover lost data on boot up. So I uninstalled the partially installed CloneCD on WinXP. But there is currently no data in the registry for clonecd in XP... so it cant be that then.

Is there some sort of 'thing' which controls every single CD-DVD Rom Drive, like some ASPI Layer or various driver which could have screwed up?

-edit-

Ive also removed + reinstalled the drives via Device Man but exclamation marks remain

Any help appreciated.<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by StrikeEagle on 03/07/03 12:25 PM.</EM></FONT></P>