CD-ROM & Yellow Exclamation Point!

I installed a CD-ROM drive into a friend's machine - Celeron 400 with 160MB
ram & two 4GB hard drives. (Makes me want to cry too.) It is running
Windows XP Home and has all the latest MS updates. Sometime between the
time I installed it, last summer and now, the CD-ROM drive stopped working
and I see the Yellow Exclamation mark in the Device Manager. The only
solution I have read here that works seems to be a restore and I do not know
if that will work in this case since I do not know when the problem
occurred. I did try to uninstall the device and the let the operating
system find the new hardware, but that did not solve anything.

From what I have been reading here a lot of people seem to have this problem
after the SP2 upgrade. Could it be that my friend's system is just too
dated to run Windows XP Home?

Ak