i tried what you said, and sure enough. both drives could boot from the Win XP CD by themselves, as masters, both saw discs on windows startup, and the burner again, still doenst show up as a burner. i uninstalled infra recorder, no effect. autoplay and burning still doesnt work. i would REALLY like to avoid reinstalling windows if possible.

Well, it is definitely some sort of software issue.

If reinstalling the drivers for the optical drives doesn't work, you can try uninstalling and reinstalling the primary and secondary IDE channel drivers in the IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers section in device manager. Maybe your IDE controller drivers are corrupted or have some conflicts.

When you uninstall those drivers, Windows "should" reinstall them automatically. But do it at your own risk. If the channel drivers don't reinstall automatically, you would be risking having to reinstall Windows either by repair install or completely. I have only done that once to repair a problem similar to yours (and it worked) but I can't say I know 100% that Windows will automatically reinstall them every time.

Hope that helps!

ok thanks... will try

nope. no difference

Ok, last thing I can think of...just remembered this little gem...

You can no longer access the CD drive or the DVD drive, or you receive an error message after you remove a CD recording program or a DVD recording program in Windows XP: "error code 31"

If that doesn't work then I would wonder if it is in fact a software issue...

I would try testing each drive in a different machine (if you can). If they act normally in other machines, then you can be 100% certain there is some kind of software issue in your machine. But if that fix STILL doesn't help then <shrug>

well, i know now it is a software problem. searching through the whole house, i found the MCE restore discs, and now that its installed, it works perfectly. and its much faster now too... *ponders* i wonder why MCE is so much faster than Home