CD-rom not working! Different Problem! Need help!

Friends PC, autorun is on (both manually and through regedit).
Windows XP, found a lot of viruses on it! Ran Bitdefender's online scan, trendmicro's online scan and installed McAfee's Virus Scanner Enterprise edition 8.0i. Turned off restore, ran scan and restarted. I even updated the firmware for the cd/dvd drive. I also ran hijackthis.

When you try to open the cd-rom drive manually it opens to an empty folder...

This is one of those friends who eventhough they ran there pc without a firewall/virus protection, and without the windows updates thinks there pc was fine until you ran a virus scan. The same person who asked me to take a look at and fix his cd-rom drive while I was playing GTA SA on the PS2. So after my turn was up, I hopped on. I found numerous errors with hijackthis that redirected his browser when he tried to go to a anti-virus website. I tried to remove most of the errors, but he has a few programs that I never saw before and he likes those yahoo and google search bars.

I am currently at home, and he had to use his PC and started getting fussy, complaining how he didn't have any major problems, and how a restore usually fixes everything.

Besides the fixing his PC just to make him look stupid for ordering a new DVD-rom, I would like to have an idea incase I run across this in the future.

Thanx for your time, and a link to another topic (if this is a repeated question) will help too! I did a search, no luck. Going to do a few more, might be using wrong keywords!

His problem was probably a hardware error or a Driver corruption.
first thing he should have done ,was go into Device Manager and
uninstalled it ,then rebooted ,and Device Manager would have found
new hardware ,and it would have been installed again,(99.9% of the
time this fixes the error with the hardware)
I personally like autorun to be my default for the CD.

Oops, sorry this was the fourth site I posted in, kinda forgot to mention we tried that! Uninstalled, restarted let windows find new drivers. Installed updated firmware, even uninstalled disconnected and re-installed! He also has one of those towers where you can slide the bays out throught he front. Think he might of did it while the PC was on and shorted something!

My question is, if it was hardware related, shouldn't it read no-cd found or incert cd-rom? It opens the D:\ directory (cd) but there are no files listed!

Can it be a registry problem? Sort of like how Fat/Fat32 can not see NTFS files?

Did you try multiple disks to see if it read any of them? It would be an obvious mistake, but usually these things are just little laughable issues.

If not that then try the same drive in your computer and see what happens. If it runs then you at least know it is with his computer.

If it is his computer, put in a bootable CD (Knoppix works great because it wont change anything) and set the CD-ROM drive up to boot from it in his BIOS. Then turn off the computer and unplug the HDD so you are just running off of the CD. If the BIOS detects no operating system or disk in the drive then I would think to try to replace his IDE cables. My guess is that it will boot from the CD though, and in such a case it is probably not IDE cables but a software/driver conflict.

Keep us updated!

Sorry I've been busy, also I haven't had time to work on the problem either...but I Will try that as soon I get the chance! Thanx for assistance! He ordered a new DVD-rom, should be arriving soon! If it is the IDE cabe atleast we'll have a spare..lol!

We tried audio cd's, Warcraft III, Windows, and a few other cd's!

Reformatted and new DVD-R installed!