DVD drive missing after uninstalling itunes

Has anyone heard of this weird shit. I downloaded itunes so I could buy an album (I could only find this album in the itunes shop) and after trying and failing to burn the album to CD I gave up and uninstalled itunes in disgust. The DVD drive is now gone from explorer and won't reappear whatever I do. I can't even reinstall the OS (Windows 2000 pro) as the computer thinks the drive dosen't exist. I looked around online and think something called a rootkit maybe to blame that was probably in the music files as some sort of anti piracy device but I don't know enough about PCs to fix it. Please help me.

If the drive can't be seen even when attempting to boot from your Windows CD, it's a hardware failure - it can't be a rootkit or any other software problem because nothing loads from the hard disk when booting from CD. Does the CD drive appear in the BIOS? Does the computer attempt to boot the Windows CD but can't?

The drive does appear in the BIOS but won't boot from a CD. When I try to troubleshoot the drive I get "This device is not working properly because Windows cannot load the drivers required for this device. (Code 31)". Very frustrating.

Hm - normally I'd suspect a driver issue if the code 31 was the only symptom, but the fact that the system can't boot from CD is still indicative of a hardware failure (I presume you've checked that the CD-ROM is higher in the boot priority than the hard drive in your BIOS setup screen?). If the CD drive genuinely isn't functioning, then perhaps your CD burning related problems were not the fault of iTunes, but a dying CD drive. Anyway, you could try removing the device from Device Manager and rebooting to let Windows detect and install the hardware anew.

I reset the boot priority with no result and have put another ROM drive in the PC with no change. I've also tried uninstalling then reinstalling several times with no joy. If all else fails I'll format the HDD and start again.

Why would you format the HDD for a hardware issue?

at least your dvd drives work.i have 2 and my pc will not read them period.

find a crap cd drive and instal that, and isntall your dvd drive slave to it.when it reads it if it does,take out the shit one and replace with good dvd drive. voila.worked for my friend. im not a comp pro, so i have no idea how that worked, but hey, you never know.