CD-ROM drive disappeared and I cannot see it in My Computer window. What can I do?
One day you turn
on your computer and cannot see the CD-ROM or the DVD-ROM drive in the My
Computer window anymore. This problem is very common for laptop and notebook
computers and might be caused by a failed drive or by corrupted software. You
can try the following repair steps before you decide that your drive is bad.
I found this solution on Microsoft website
and it helped me many times to fix the problem with a missing DVD/CD-ROM drive.
I always try to replace the existing driver first and if it doesn’t fix the
problem I go with removing the registry entry. Method 1 worked very well for
me. If the above mentioned methods didn’t work
for you, you can try to reseat the optical drive. Overtime the CD-ROM drive
connector might get oxidized and a simple drive reseating can fix the problem.
Try to remove the drive from the laptop and put it back. See if it will fix the
problem. You can also try to boot from any bootable
CD to see if you laptop recognize the CD-ROM drive on BIOS level. Put any
bootable CD (Live Linux CD, Windows XP CD, Windows 2000 CD, etc) into the
CD-ROM drive and change the boot order to start from the CD-ROM drive. If you
laptop starts to boot from the CD, then the drive is recognized in BIOS and
most likely it operates properly. In this case look for a software problem. It
might be necessary to reload the operating system to fix the software problem.
If you cannot boot your laptop from a bootalbe CD, then the drive might be bad
itself.