Optical Drives Not Appearing... Anywhere!

[Singh23]

First of all, I would just like to say hi. I signed up to this forum, only a few minutes ago, as my friend recommended me to here.

My Specs:

• AMD Athlon 64 x2 Dual Core Processor 4400+ (2.21 GHz)
• 2048MB RAM (DDR2)
• NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX

Now down to my problem:

I have two optical drives; a DVD-Rom and a DVD-RW drive. About a week ago, both of the optical drives disappeared from 'My Computer'. At first, I wasn't too worried, as this problem had occurred before. I am not too sure how the problem had cleared up the last time, but I do know that it cleared up without me doing anything to it. Both trays currently open and close quite easily and even the lights indicate that the drives are still receiving power, etc.

I did check in 'Computer Management' and noticed that both of the disc drives had disappeared from the list. I then went into my System BIOS and also noticed that there was nothing listed at all under the Primary/Secondary IDE sections.

After this, I decided to have a look into my Device Manager and noticed that two items had replaced my original DVD drives, with the names of 'Disk Drive'. [Only today, these two 'Disk Drive' devices had now renamed themselves into 'Generic STORAGE DEVICE USB Device'].

To overcome this problem, I tried System Restore, but there was no early enough date that I could revert to where the drives would work, with System Restore only going a week back. I used CCleaner to fix registry issues, which I realised I had a lot of. I also deleted the two new items from my device manager in hoping that they would re-install themselves into the original DVD drives, but to no avail. I have even tried opening up my PC in order to check if the connections were loose, but they were fine.

I am sure that I have tried many other things, but I can't quite remember at the moment. Can anybody offer me any tips as to what to do? I am really stuck here. Thanks in advance!




EDIT: I should also mention that two different 'Removable Drives' have appeared in My Computer, in the place of the two drives.

[UltraMagnus]

sounds stupid but, check that the cables are plugged in.

[s_kinton]

Could easily be a faulty IDE cable. Have you tried a different one?

Have you got the drivers setup correctly as master and slave?

[killie99]

Have a look at this Microsoft article and give it a go:

You can no longer access the CD drive or the DVD drive, or you receive an error message after you remove a CD recording program or a DVD recording program in Windows XP: "error code 31"

[Singh23]

Thanks for the responses.

I have already opened my PC and reconnected all the cables that were connected to the drives, but it still didn't do the trick.

I thought about it having to do with faulty cables, although what are the chances that both cables for both drives would fail at the same time? Also, both drives do not appear in the System BIOS, meaning I am not able to assign them Master/Slave status.

Thanks for the article, but the drives are not mentioned in device manager and these registries also do not now exist. I still have tried clearing the registries even though they weren't there, however.

Any other ideas on what it could be? If not, I might purchase some IDE cables to check if they work with the drives. Thanks.

[Splash]

If the drives aren't appearing in the BIOS you can pretty much discount any Windows related shenanigans. Is your hard drive(s) IDE or SATA? I assume based on your wording above that it's SATA, otherwise at least the hard drive should be showing in the BIOS. I also assume that the optical drives are on seperate channels with nothing else on (again, this is based on your wording) - is each drive plugged in at the end of the cable and not using the middle connector?

Master/Slave status is set using a jumper on the back of the drive, not in the BIOS. I suspect that both will be set to CS - in this case (and if both drives are on seperate channels) you need to move this jumper to be master for it to reliably work. Some people will say C/S is fine, but I've found it to cause a number of issues similar to this in the past.

Failing that - Are you able to try with just one drive? Can you put a bootable disc in the drive and see if you can boot off it? If both drives work individually and they're on seperate channels, but not together I'd be tempted to think that it could be a PSU issue.

[oldboy47]

Some time ago I had a similar problem where the optical drive would disappear at the bios level. Manufacturers support worked through the problem with me and it was eventually resolved by disconnecting the power and signal cables from the optical drives and also disconnecting the main supply to the PC for a short period - say 5 mins. Restoring the cables and the power and the drives re-appeared in the bios and operating system.