I installed a Firewire PCI Adapter Card , no brand, about 3 weeks ago. After installing it, my two ROM drives do not work (they are a Sony DVD drive and a CDRW drive).
I am using the Firewire card to access an iPOD. The iPOD works fine.
I have a four year old Dell, running XP Pro.
The iPOD help forum told me to do the following:
"Don't worry -- it's harmless (I wouldn't steer you wrong here) -- just go into your Windows Device manager (with your firewire card installed) and find the secondary IDE devices that represent those drives, and delete them. While you're at it it wouldn't hurt to delete the firewire device as well. Then, with the iPod NOT attached, reboot your machine and let it find everything (XP is good at this). All should be fine then."
I did this, and all worked fine. Then, the next time I rebooted, the problem re-occurred, and my drives are not working again.
[You can see the drives in "My Computer", but when you put a disk in, nothing happens. If you click on the drive in My Computer, you get a message "Please insert disk into drive D:" even if there is a disk already installed. I am not sure if it is the Firewire card causing the problem, or the Apple iTunes software.
I initially installed iTunes not on my C drive, but now it is on my C drive (and my music collection is on a different partition.)