All of a sudden my PC is not reconising my NEC DVD RW ND1300A. It shows this a "named drive", but when I try and do anything with it, it will only work with CDs. I've tried it with NERO 6, DVD Santa and Ulead, all show the drive but state that there is nothing in it to write to.
I have downloaded latest firmware, this has made no difference.

Help please.

Have you tried removing the drive in Device Manager and rebooting to have Windows redetect it?

Just tried, same as before, properties just show it as a CD RW. Thanks for trying

Try this:


http://www.theeldergeek.com/restore_missing_cd_or_dvd_drive.htm

Hi,
You mentioned you have the latest firmware update. If you would like to check to see if you really do, here is a link:
http://drivers.softpedia.com/get/FIRMWARE/Nec/Nec-ND1300A-firmware-172.shtml

The other link given in the other answer does require Editing the Registry, and hopefully will work.
If you wish to try something first, but not sure if this will solve the problem, you can restore the registry automatically.
Start up the computer, and immediately start pressing and releasing the F8 key.
When the menu comes up, use the up and down arrows on the keyboard to select "Last Known Good Configuration". Press Enter.
This will re-set the Registry to the last know good one. It might work, but again, might not solve the issue.
Best of luck.

Thanks to both. I have a later version of Driver than that shown. Reg Edit scares me to death, only done it once and I altered 1 character too many and finished up having to reinstall. Have today been to PC World and found a new DVD+- RW for under £40, so to save any more hassle, I intend to buy that and replace my existing one.
Could not leave rating for either as I already have left some where you answered my other question over DVD Compression.
Thanks a lot

You might want to try physically moving the drive to another IDE channel. For example, if your DVD drive is secondary master, you could swap it to secondary slave with your CD-Rom drive.

Google instructions before you do; you might have to change the jumper settings on the back of both drives.