this problem i had the minute after i formatted my hard drive and reinstalled windows XP. When i insert a cd in my cd or dvd drive, windows doesn't detect the cd and i can't acces it. Sometimes i get an error : drive not ready. Both cd and dvd drive are detected in windows and before i formatted my hard drive everything worked perfect.
any exclamation marks in device manager??. remove drives from device manager than restart windows to load it's own drivers
reseat all drive cables both on drives & on motherboard. physically disable a drive than restart computer to see if windows sees other drive & a disk. try that with other drive too. which drive is master & slave & on what cable
This sounds like a jumper problem. Albeit, if it worked before I have no idea why it wouldn't now. Especially if you haven't changed anything. I had the same problem in one of my older PCs when I set the DVD-Rom and the CD Burner both to master. They'd come up in XP but neither of them would work.
if it worked before, it has to work now ! it had to got something to do with windows. I tried updates, etc
i never installed or downloaded sp2. Automatic updates ar disabled, and i've checked it, it is not installed.