FOr some reason my Sony DRU-530A DVD-RW drive doesn't show up? I can find it under Device Manager but can't enable it?
:(

It is my secondary CD/DVD drive. The primary one is a Samsung SM-348B.

I am running Windows XP SP2. Any ideas?
:confused:

try swapping the drives. I did this and it worked for me. also make sure one is set to master/slave. if both drives are configed to master/slave it wont show up.

Where is it that the drive doesn't show up; Windows Explorer?

You say it does show up in Device Manager.
Is it shown there as disabled or what?

Which drives are:
Primary Master?
Primary Slave?
Secondary Master?
Secondary Slave?

In your BIOS Setup, are all the drives set to "Auto", and is the controller [Primary/Secondary IDE] enabled that this drive is connected to?
Do you see them ALL being correctly detected [on screen] during startup?

Has the drive ever worked at any time?

Down load and run Windows XP Upgrade Advisor (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/upgrading/advisor.mspx) to see if all your hardware and software is XP compatible or not.

Boot into safe and delete all instances of that drive [is there more than one?], then reboot into normal Windows to see if the drive is redetected.

When did this start? I had that same drive and I had to have it replaced once because of that and it happened again and I just gave up and went with an Lite-On.

This stared two days ago. Been working fine till then. Built this system about 2 years ago.

What I recently did was to upgrade to Service Pack 2 (using Windows XP Professional), and I also flashed the firmware for the Samsung drive.

It does show up in device manager as disable and when I try to enable it, Windows says it can't do it. It doesn't show up in windows explorer.

I believe that the Samsung is Secondary Master and the Sony is Secondary Slave.

In your BIOS Setup, are all the drives set to "Auto", and is the controller [Primary/Secondary IDE] enabled that this drive is connected to?Will check on this.
Do you see them ALL being correctly detected [on screen] during startup?Yes, I do.

I think that the Samsung is set to Cable Select while the Sony is set to Slave.

"the Samsung is set to Cable Select while the Sony is set to Slave"
I don't think you should mix "Cable Select" & "Slave" like this.
A slave must have a master, but you have nothing jumpered as master.
Either make one Master [on the end connector] and the other Slave [on the middle connector]; or else jumper them both as "Cable Select" and put the Sony DVD rewriter on the end connector [makes it Master] and the Samsung CD-RW & DVDE reader on the middle connector [makes it Slave]. With Cable Select you must use a 40-pin 80-wire IDE cable [if I remember right].

"when I try to enable it, Windows says it can't do it"
Is there any clue given as to why it's disabled by Windows?
I've seen other posts on the PC Guide where an optical drive is disabled because of a setting in the registry tha needs to be changed, but cannot remember the details.

Don't mean to bump this thread but I wanted to post the solution to my problem. I basicaly just deleted the instance of the Sony drive from the hardware profile and told Windows to look for new hardware. The Samsung was set to Master and Sony set as Slave with those 'pins' you insert in the back of the drive.