I started getting blue screens a couple days ago and it's associated after I installed Portal 2 and something to do with my DVD player/recorder no longer being recognized.

So I paid way too much money for some programs online "guaranteed" to fix blue screen problems, and yeah they kinda went away, which lead me to find out they corrupted a few of my programs along the way, one of them being StarCraft II. So I went to reinstall SCII and that's when I found out my DVD drive completely disappeared.

When I used to click on "Computer" it would show about 10 drives most of them unassigned, including my C drive, D drive (optical), and E drive (SSD).

Now it just shows C, E and a back up drive through Norton. So I went online and did a huge amount of time wasting to get to the point of paying for a session with Microsoft where they take control of your computer ($49) and fix your problem. Three hours later, they threw up their hands and said, sorry it's hardware related.

So now I'm down to a couple of options.

1. If I get my computer to stop blue screening I could buy an external DVD recorder/player and install games from that. Problems not solved, just worked around.

2. I could wipe my C drive and reformat it and reinstall the programs I'd lose, which aren't that many since this is my gaming computer and just gaming stuff is stored on here. The question I have is, if I wipe my C drive for a fresh install, will I lose anything on my E drive (SSD) where WoW, Innerspace, Isboxer are all stored? I made a list of all the programs I'd need to reinstall, and was surprised it wasn't that many, so that's not a hassle, just the backup, clean install, and reinstall of the programs (so we're talking a few hours work probably).

What ideas do people have on this?

Thanks again in advance,

Malgor