Do you have them on the same cable?

You should try to run your computer with only one drive installed(disconnect the DVD for example), and see what happens then. Try to isolate the problem by doing all the combos(leave DVD on CD-R off, and then CD-R on DVD off).That all depends of course if you have them installed on the same controller.
A trick you can use when the system is doing this, is trying to log off and then log on again(it doesn't solve your problem but at least you don't have to reboot all the time in order to do the troubleshooting).
My DVD is doing this sometimes(rarely), and usually logging off and logging on again does the trick.But if you have on every boot then it is quite anoying i guess.

Yes both drives are on the same cable.I've tried it with only one device plugged in, it does not matter. I can log in and log out, restart all day long it does not help. I've uninstalled the devices from device manager, and reinstalled them. No matter what I do it wont read the disks without rebooting.

Open "My Computer", and then right click on the CD. Next, select the Autoplay tab and (if possible and desirable) click the "Reset Defaults" button. You could also specify the behaviors manually if you like. It sounds like the CD burner software just disabled Auto Insert Notification, and this is what I found on Technet to re-enable it in WinXP.

I have a similar problem. I too am running xp with two drives, a creative dvd and a plextor 1210a and i also use nero as my burning software. My problem is that none of the cds I write with the plextor/nero could be read by the dvd drive. I have to use the plextor to read the cds I burn with it, whether data or audio cds. Funny thing is the audio cds can be read by my cd players, both my discman and home audio cd player. I havent tried having an ordinary cd rom read the cds i burn with the plextor, but I will try it tomorrow. I only noticed this problem this week. The other cds I burned before this are readable by my dvd drive. the last software i remember installing before this happened was freemp3, it's a utility to make the media player xp capable of ripping cd's to mp3. I uninstalled it already but I still have the same problem. And another thing, my brother runs xp also with a 1210a plextor and an asus dvd drive and he has the same problem as me. Any ideas?

Sounds like it is a firmware problem with the Plextor Drive. I would contact Plextor with this problem, include both yours and your brothers system specs when writing to them too. I have had no problems burning from my Sony burner and having those CDs being read in my DVD-ROM drive. So it sounds like a firmware issue with the plextor drive you have.

Plextor drives seen to be common to the problems we are having. But I still have the issue when the plextor is not even pluged in, and btw I am using the current firmware for my plextor.

Sorry about your trouble. Fireburner software disables the XP autoplay feature. In my case it's fireburner. the solution I found was to install "TWEAK-XP"nice prog by the way.
In the hardware tweaks section look for the cd/dvd tweaks.Open this and make sure autoplay feature isn't disabled.It was on mine.This should solve your problem.After a reboot of course.

its not the autoplay feature that is the problem. I put a cd into either the DVD or CDRW drive and double click on it and XP asks me to put a disk into the drive. I can sit there and hit refresh til my hands are sore and it will still ask for a disk.

Autoplay and Autoinsert Notification used to be separate things in the Win9X OSs, but they seem to have been combined in XP which was why I posted my suggestion. Did you check to see if they were set to "Prompt user for action"?

its set to prompt me for action.
 
 
 
Also when I goto the properties for the DVD or CDRW drive and goto the Volumes tab and click the populate button it show me the size of the cd thats in the drive but thats all.

Just released that my Plextor was having same problem. it was the 16x CDRW. WOuld time out alot too

Hi guys, I'm surprised none of you have sussed this 1 out yet, especially as I mentioned something about it previously in another thread - if you have InCD installed then odds are that that's the culprit - on mine it did exactly the same thing as SparcV described. As soon as I uninstalled InCD the problem disappeared.
 
PS - I still use Nero & it works great.

I don't have In-cd installed in my computer so that's out of the question. SparcV, i haven't tried upgrading the firmware of my plextor yet. How do I know what firmware I'm using? XP doesn't seem to display this in the hardware properties in device manager like win98. Also, I noticed that you too use an Abit motherboard albeit a different model. And we indeed have the same problem, I have to turn my computer off with the plextor-burned CDR inside the dvd and turn it on again for it to read the disc.

I dont have InCD installed and never had, the only burning software I have installed is Nero and Fireburner. I've uninstalled them, but it does not fix it.

I gave up. My ibm HD is on its last leg, so I decided to just reinstall XP into a spare drive while the ibm gets replaced. Anyway is there any program that can track changes to the registery so I can see what changes if this happens again?

I once had a call from an angry salesman telling me how he could not do his presentation because I had given him a bad monitor. After asking him to turn the brightness up, which solved the problem, he still didn't say "thankyou." Anyway the reason I started this way is because I have seen this XP Dual CD problem before it has always been down to one thing; although all the ideas above are good I think it may be time to turn the brightness up.
 
Make sure that if you are using a standard IDE cable that one of the drives is set to master and the other to slave. In addition some DMA capable drives don't like being run in PIO modes, so if DMA is possible then TURN IT ON. I have had some users say that CDR/RW drivers only work in PIO mode. This is so much BULL PUCKY, the usual reason is a bad ASPI layer. Anyway I digress. The main fault with CD-ROM drives not being recognised is down to the more frequent availability of CS cables, something I fully condone. If your IDE cable has more than one colour of connector (BLUE one for the board, BLACK one for one drive and GREY for the other) then you must set up your drives using one of the following options.
 
EITHER: Switch both drives to CS. The one connected to the black connector will have the lowest drive letter.
 
OR: Set the drive connected to the BLACK connector to MASTER and the GREY connector one to SLAVE. If you have this the other way around then drives vanish randomly. This is true for HDD too.
 
So far I have solved over 95% of this type of fault this way, the other 5ish% was due to normal drive failure. I do wish they would document this in the M/B manuals. Anyway, that's my 2cents worth.
 
Happy burning.
 
Oh BTW, SCSI does not suffer this way. As consumers we should protest about IDE and give up on it. The idea that SCSI is more expensive is only put about by greedy hardware vendors. Each IDE-SCSI controller (yes I can run IDE drives as scsi devices!) I build costs about 15quid (20 dollars). I am sure big manufacturers could get this down to 1 dollar. Or just start with SCSI and it costs nothing!