Came across an unusual observation that the optical drive (Asus DVDRW) would not work consistently in XP after restoring image from another PC. Optical drive was recognized as DVD-ram drive in <My Computer>. When a data CD is inserted, the drive label changed to CD with null content, even though the disc was read correctly on other PC.However, under <Administrative Tools>, <Computer Management>, <Storage> and <Disk management>, the size of data on disk was reported correctly.
If I removed the IDE device from Device Manager and reboot. Windows would find new hardware and optical drive could be working for that session. If I changed CD, there was a 50/50 chance of not reading. Reboot usually had not helped.
My first reaction was that the optical drive was faulty. But it worked on other systems. Strange thing was that if I used a different make of optical drive, Windows worked as normal. It just did not like the Asus optical rewriter.
As I have a few images in my office, I restored a different image to the same hardware. The Asus optical drive was working OK. The culprit got to be software configuration. As optical drive is the only device that had not worked, and drive letter varies with the partition setup, it dawned to me that perhaps I should change the drive letter to be the same as in original hardware. As I have the habit of changing the drive letter of rewritable optical drive to W, it would be a good place to start. Once the driver letter was changed to W, lo and behold, the problem disappeared!
Perhaps it may save time in the future if the drive letter for the optical drive is recorded against the drive image.