External Disk Drive quit

Hello,

I know little more about computers than how to turn them on and get where I want through a search engine. So please, make your answers simple to understand.

Several months ago, my disk drive stopped opening. I couldn't use it anymore at all. Since I didn't use it that much anyway, I didn't worry about it at the time. I later found out that my daughter had the same problem with her computer at the same time, as did her inlaws, their families, and several friends, and my neighbor recently told me she did too; I had never discussed it with my father until today, but he told me his quit last year as well. Since all these happened at the same time, I am convinced that it had to be a bug, worm, or virus of some sort that hit Windows. We were all on XP. My daughter's father-in-law is the only one who has been able to fix it, and he did it by uninstalling Windows, and starting over. I just can't believe that I can't find any information on such a problem anywhere.

I have had 2 computer people look at my computer. The first installed 4 other disk drives, none of which worked either, eliminating the possiblity that it was the drive itself. He says the computer doesn't even recognize the presence of the disk drive. He believes it to be a problem with the drivers; I don't even know what that means. The second guy said it is a registry problem; don't know what that is either. Both agreed, however, that uninstalling and starting over will fix either problem.

Problem with that solution is, I can't seem to get all my music onto the flash drive I bought, and I don't want to lose it. It picked up all the albums, but only random songs. (?) And they both tell me that there is a chance that it might not fix it, and it might not even start back up. To top that off, I have no idea what I did with the Windows start-up disk; I never thought of needing it again.

Any ideas? Was this a wide-spread problem? Is there a fix for it? I already paid Paretologic $50 for driver cures that only caused my computer to not restart when installed! Needless to say, it didn't work. Anything that can be done that won't cost another fortune?

(Also, don't think it's related, but my audio went out a couple of days ago, and I have no idea why. At first, I had sound on games, but not online or in my media player. Now I have no sound anywhere.)

Appreciate any help. I'm totally lost.