For some unexplained reason, the DVD drive on my home computer disappeared. Not physically – it’s still mounted in the case! But logically. A bit strange, as it was still listed in the BIOS at startup, but Windows XP didn’t show it under the local drives and the following message was in the System Event Log:

Event Type:    Error Event Source:    Service Control Manager Event Category:    None Event ID:    7026 Description: The following boot-start or system-start driver(s) failed to load: Cdrom

Opening up Device Manager revealed the drive was listed, but had a problem - “Windows cannot load the device driver for this hardware. The driver may be corrupted or missing. (Code 39)”

I don’t know how this happened, but KB Article 314060 describes a resolution that worked for me.

This wasn’t actually the first thing I tried. Thinking that it may be hardware-related, I bought a new Pioneer DVR-216. Being a SATA drive, I then installed this into Dad’s video editing machine (which also meant I could do away with the extra IDE card and just use the motherboard IDE slot) and took his old PATA DVD drive and tried that in my older machine. As it turns out it didn’t make any difference to me, though Dad has probably ended up better off.