I bought my self a new cd writer today and connected it and it says in the manual that is automatically installs iself to the computer but i turned my computer on and it hasnt installed,to make things worse my dvd drive wont work either it seems to have dissapeared off the computer when i go to add nww hardware that does not detect my cd writer or my dvd drive either,what can i do??

did you set the jumpers up proir to installing new cdrw?
what set up have you got, ie have you connected the cdwr to your dvd drive ,if so the new cdrw would have to be set as slave ,when you buy a device such as this they are allways set as mater

Check the bios setting too, IDE primary master or slave, or IDE secondary master or slave, one of them which the device is attached to, need to be selected as "Auto".

If you dont know which one is, let us know the IDE cable and attachement, will let you know the jumpers and bios setting.

Regards

cheers got it sorted now i had them both as master