I'm pretty sure I know exactly what happened, but I don't how to fix it. I'm pretty sure that while my dad was deleting stuff to clear space on the hard-drive, he saw some file that took up like a half a gig and was like "Oh, dum dee dum, that's gone." I'm pretty sure that file had something to do with my CD burner.

However, I know that file was not the CD burner's drivers, because I've updated the drivers, uninstalled and re-installed the drivers, and rolled back the drivers, and none of those things worked.

It's not a loose wire, because I checked that already.

Basically, my computer knows my CD burner is there, it just won't let me burn a CD, and the burner doesn't show up on the My Computer screen. When I go into device manager, the CD burner has a yellow exclamation point by it. Whenever my external hard drive does that, it just means I need to update the drivers. I don't know WTF to do.

Any suggestions?

um right click (in device manager) go to properties and then it should tell you what the error is.

The error message it gives me is "Windows successfully loaded the device driver for this hardware but cannot find the hardware device. (Code 41)"

However, I know it's plugged in properly because I just checked it.

Is the jumper set properly? Master if it's the only drive (or first drive on the cable), slave if it's a secondary drive (connected as the second drive on the same cable), or cable select if you have no clue.

Your cable may have died. try a different one.