Ok I have a Toshiba Satellite PRO 6000 that crashed and burnt last year. Have it mostly recovered, but now the operating system does not recognize the Samsung SD-R2102 DVD ROM drive IE Drive D:
Toshiba says it uses standard windows drivers and no special drivers are required.
I go to hardware manager and it recognizes it as the Samsung SD-R2102 DVD ROM drive, but gives me the :!:
Toshiba says to re-install or update windows, but with out the drive being recognized as D: how the hell am I suppose to get the Windows XP cd to run?
boot up with the XP cd in the drive. When you first turn the machine on most cd drives are run by very simple drivers, You really only need two or three drivers to get 99% of all cd drives to work. Make sure of course that your cd drive is bootable in your bios. XP and 98se cds are bootable. If that doesn't work you have a good chance that your hardware is hosed.
something i have done in the past is. In hardware manager, there the ! is. Highlight it, press the delete button on the keyboard and reboot. That's a 50/50 fix for me.
another possibility, along the lines of what Raze suggested. Go into Safe mode (hit f8 while booting up). Once in safe mode look in your device manager. In Safe mode you see all the existing drivers. In other words if you used to have a Nvidia 5200 card but something happened to it ;-) and then you installed a ATI card, under video you may see both still listed. Sometimes an old driver will conflict with the "current driver". In this case you may see multiple entries for this dvd drive, delete them all and then it'll reinstall itself when you reboot.
Have not tried the safe mode one yet, but have deleted the hardware, it finds new hardware, knows what it is. Samsung DVD rom installs it then gives the :!: right after the PNP install..... Grrrrrrrrr