A few months ago. I noticed my regular CD-RW/ROM DVD drive suddenly quit working with the yellow circle and exclamation mark. That CD-Drive came with my Dell Inspiron 8600 which runs XP Pro- SP2. At this point my computer detects no CD/DVD Drive. I have a floppy drive that uses the same bay in the laptop it works fine. Awhile after I noticed this, I shut it down and when I booted it I got the blue screen- Unmountable Boot Volume message. I shut down and it rebooted fine. Interestingly enough I got this message a month earlier- the last time I remember the CD drive working. Below are some things I've done to no avail.

My question is two-fold- 1) Does anyone have a new solution or advice? 2) Does anyone know how to do a reinstall of Windows XP without a working CD-Drive?

Things I've checked/ done:
New CD-Drive- I actually have tried two others. One internal a Sony DW-Q58A that I bought from Dell- results no drive detected. Thinking it was a motherboard issue I bought an External CD Drive HP 740e-RF- results no drive detected. This uses a USB port and should be detected fine. Both drives work on other computers.

Refresh and Update BIOS- I called Dell support- no help. They even had me reload and update BIOS.

Reinstalled Driver for Sony CD Drive- When I tried to reinstall driver the message came up asking to overwrite the driver already there. I said yes and clicked the installed driver. Another error message came up saying "No match drive detected- the utility is for Sony DVD RW DW-Q58A. Detected Drives: (none listed)"

Manually installed software that came with new Sony Drive- Thinking drivers were on the CD that came with the Sony CD/DVD Drive I manually (using a USB storage drive) installed the Sonic software.

Uninstalled all CD/DVD software- Thinking some software was conflicted I uninstalled ALL CD-DVD related software. The only thing uninstallable was DVD Sentry.

Cleaned out drive bay- I used compressed air to clean out drive bay.

Two coincidences-
1) Around the time it stopped I had Lavasoft's Ad-Aware installed and had Ad-Watch running. On a reboot a warning message appeared telling me about some application trying to access the system. Normally I allow but this time I said- block. Turns out upon reboot none of the applications would open. I usesd system restore and was able to get back to normal. A week or so later I noticed the CD-Drive was not recognized.
2) I Googled unrecognized CD-Drives and saw Sony had software that loaded when you downloaded some of there music CD's. If you tried to remove it it would disable the computer from seeing a CD-Drive. I do not recall loading the offending CD's that dumped the app into the registry not do I consciously remember trying to remove the offending apps from Sony.

If you have a second computer, say a tower, remove the hard drive from the tower. Then remove the hard drive from the laptop. You will need to purchase an adapter so your laptop hard drive (probably 2.5" hard drive) will plug into the tower. These are available all over the internet for $8 USD or so.

Then install Windows using the tower. Seeing how there is only one hard drive in the tower (your laptop hard drive) it will install to that hard drive.

After Windows completes, you can copy the contents of your driver disk onto the laptop hard drive (perhaps putting the contents in a folder on the desktop so they can be found easily).

Then reinstall the laptop hard drive back into the laptop. Then you can open drivers folder on the laptop and start installing the needed drivers.

It sounds difficult, but it really isn't. It just takes some preparation.

If you have other questions on how to do any one of the above steps, please ask here, we are willing to help!