More Windows madness

[ciphergoth]

I have to get the cable modem failing under Windows before I can call support about it. My efforts to do this are hampered by Windows failing in new and interesting ways.

This time, it has lost the CD-ROM drive. I've looked in the Device Manager, and it can't see anything hanging off the secondary IDE. I've tried disabling and re-enabling it, to no effect. Linux can still see and use the drive just fine, so it's not a hardware problem. Without the CD-ROM drive, I can't make it do very much...

Does anyone have any idea what might cause a problem like this, or what I can do to fix it? Or am I stuck with finally buying a backup device and re-installing Windows?

Comments

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

The trouble is that in my experience Windows doesn't like being installed second. As I understand it, there's a danger it'll attack my Linux partition... and I don't have enough disk space anywhere on the network to back that up.

[babysimon]

I've only done the dual boot thing with W9x, but I've never had much of a problem with it - it'll kill LILO but you have a boot floppy/cd, right?

But mistrusting windows is probably never a bad thing.