marni b

Out of the blue (no changes made to programs or hardware),
my Toshiba DVD-ROM SD-M1202 drive and my TDK CD-RW241040B
drive have both stopped playing DVD or data CD-ROM disks -
I can listen to audio CD's on both, but this is the only
type of media disk that either of my drives recognize.

I have called Dell as well as TDK, and both told me I need
to re-install Windows 2000, but I'm afraid to do this as,
1) I'm afraid that once I remove Windows, I'm not going to
be able to re-install due to being unable to read
install/data disks from either of my drives, and, 2) I'm
not sure where all my other program CD-install disks are
right now...

Does anyone know what I can do to fix this problem besides
re-installing my operating system? Is there a way to try
to identify which operating files have been corrupted/are
missing, and try to solve the problem this way?

Thanks very much - Marni