cd and dvd not being recognized by windows xp

Please help. I soent 7 hours on the phone today with microsoft and dell with no fix for probelm. windows auto updated to service pack 3 and i lost access to my cd and dvd-rw drives. I already tried the microsftfix #314060 with the tech over the phone. This did not work nor did updating drivers or uninstalling/reinstalling affected drives. Bios for my dell 8400 desktop seems to not show drives and all of sudden my computer is staring up funny showing the an "a" drive floppy which i do not have installed. Does anyone have any ideas on how to fix this problem. I would appreciate any and all advice?

 

hmm - i would concentrate on getting the drives to show up properly in BIOS. write down your current bios settings if messing with bios settings scares you. windows will not recognize the drives until bios does. try manually setting the drives to the proper settings first. if that doesn't work, i would try resetting the bios to factory defaults. is this a laptop? if so, remove the drive and see if bios works correctly, if so, boot to windows. if that works and you reinsert the drive and you still have issues, i would be skeptical of the drive. maybe not the best advice, but hopefully it helps.