Windows without CDROM/DVDROM (solved)

De curând am avut o mică experienţă neplăcută cu un sistem ceva mai vechi (cu un Pentium 4 la 1.8GHz şi placă de bază cu chipset i845) şi anume : la fiecare pornire a sistemului îmi era adus la cunoştinţă că driverul DVDROM-ului lipseşte şi că trebuie instalat şi astfel era pornit acel wizard de instalare a driverului care eşua după ce nu găsea chipurile un driver corect pentru unitate.
Am reuşit să-i dau relativ rapid de cap : lipsea un fişier important al driverilor Windows şi anume cdrom.inf

Rezolvarea : se copiază acest fişier aflat într-un pachet mai vechi (vezi Microsoft KB http://support.microsoft.com/kb/320174) direct în \Windows\inf .

(English version)
Recently I've experienced an unpleasant issue on an older system (with a P4 CPU on a i845 chipset-based motherboard) : at every system startup there was a wizard started that was supposed to install the DVDROM drivers. The wizard was failing (stating that it couldn't find a suitable driver) but the solution was pretty simple: the cdrom.inf file was missing.

Solution: copy the file from a SP1 update package (check Microsoft KB http://support.microsoft.com/kb/320174) directly in \Windows\inf