XP cant detect my optical drives, how should I reinstall it?

Can you boot from your windows CD? If you were reformatting you'd either need to do that or get a bootdisk that you can use...obviously you'll need an environment you could boot into in which you could access the drives before your can reinstall so there's no point in reformatting until then.

You might want to try some weird things, like switching around IDE channels, unplugging one of the drives, etc before you go to the trouble of reformatting though. I take it that when you say you recently reinstalled windows you mean that you installed over top of an existing copy of windows? Why did you do that (just curious if it could have anything to do with what's going on just now). Also, what do you mean that windows can't detect the drives exactly. Are they not present in device manager, or do you just not see them under my computer?

I have already tried unplugging the DVD RW drive, that didnt work. I reinstalled windows because the Windows Management Instrument wasnt working, and it still isnt. They arent in the device manager, my computer, and no disc is being autoran. I have tried to get into it via run, no luck there either.

I just checked if it would boot from the XP disc, and it will.

The only other thing I can think of off the top of my head is to make sure that you have the correct drivers for your motherboard loaded....that could cause it to not see the drives in windows and it could have been somehow lost during the reinstall. Sometimes as well you can find duplicate entries (or unknown hardware entries) in device manager if you boot into safe mode (press f8 at startup).

Then again, I'm guessing you're going to reformat anyways since WMI still isn't working.

Thanks for your help, but I think the easiest way would be to just reformat it, WMI isnt working, and I cant think of a way to fix it, nor can I really find a way to fix the drives. I checked the device manager in safe mode (f5 also works) and the only CD/DVD drive there is the AVX CD/DvD-ROM SCSI CdRom Device. Im just gonna reformat my drive, Ill post again after I get done.

Again, thanks for trying.

EDIT: Just reformatted, drives are detected and everything is good, thanks for the help.

-B1adez