XP Professional CD-ROM issue

[Skaaddict]

I have a problem with my family's computer that has me stumped.

I built it for them two months ago, and recently it developed a problem where you could read and install from the CD-ROM, but if you tried to run a program that requires a CD in the drive it errors out with "Unable to locate CD-ROM." My first assumption was Windows had become corrupted so I reinstalled it (XP Professional) but now its back at it again. I've ruled out drive error after plugging in another drive that works on another computer, and its not a cable issue after swapping out the original cable with a brand-new cable that came with the motherboard and was never used.

Is this some vauge XP malady that I've never heard of, or is it a case of (as I'm suspecting) the motherboard is somehow shot and is causing some error where you can read, write and install from the drive but applications cannot access it?

The relevant specs are:

Gigabyte GA-7N400 Pro (Revision 2)
Lite-On 52x32x52x16x CD-RW/DVD-ROM
Windows XP Professional w/SP1a (I was running SP2 when the problem started, and frankly I can't stand SP2)

[TechKnickle]

That seems pretty strange to me... never seen it before.

Could be a bad connections somewhere on the motherboard controller, but that doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.

I would play around with some BIOS settings like DMA and some other stuff, try disabling it.

[EvilRick]

Check 'Administrative Tools\Computer Management\Disk Management' and make sure your CD-ROM is the correct letter it started out to be.

Do you have any USB devices that you might have plugged in during the install and then removed?