I have a Dell Dimension 2400 and suddenly my CD & DVD drives both aren't working. When I go to the Device Mgr, the CD has a red "X" and the DVD drive has an exclamation point.

The Dell Support Center said to uninstall, then reinstall each one. I uninstalled the CD drive and it now says it is disabled. But when I fo to enable it, it says Windows cannot complete the function. Haven't even tried to do for my DVD drive. Anyone have a clue what's going on?Did you uninstall or disable? If you uninstall, you should no longer see that drive in device manager. Then when you reboot, windows should detect ne hardware and reinstall it.I've done both. Right now both drives show a yellow exclamation point.  In the Device Manager for both it says:

CD Drive -- Windows cannot start this hardware device because its configuration information (in the registry) is incomplete or DAMAGED. (Code 19)

I'm baffled.You may try running some registry tools, see if that fixes it. I use WinDoc and regclean. Not sure what the seniors on this forum are useing.Can you elaborate? Not sure what a registry tool is. Is it an internal process or do I need to download SOMETHING from a website?Here is a link to regclean: http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file_description/0,fid,4666,00.asp

WinDoctor is part of Norton 2004 System Works

I saw a RegRepair and an EasyCleaner on the link above. Never used them but one is free and the other is a trial. Just watch the trial stuff. Sometimes, they limit the SOFTWARE so bad, it is unusable.

To elaborate more, the registry contains configuration settings used by Windows for normal operation of programs, devices, etc. Regedit is the built in tool used to manually edit the registry(not for the faint of heart). Other tools can be downloaded that automatically do it for you, the above programs for example.Did you re-boot after UNINSTALLING? Quote

Did you re-boot after uninstalling?