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 removing the CD/DVD drive from the device manager 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.
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September 22nd, 2009 at 2:10 pm
For me it worked the 2nd solution. I had this annoying problem with an HP 6720s but now it seems to be fixed.
I’ll write down the simptoms that the laptop had:
*The drive was disappearing in My Computer and not just there! I tried to install windows several times , but i wasn’t able to do it as the message “Press any key to boot from cd.. ” was not displayed and the laptop was just booting normally from the hdd.
*When the drive wasn’t displayed in “My Computer” , the CPU was used at about 11-14 % even though there was no activity in the background.
*The cursor’s movement wasn’t smooth anymore ; every 1 second the cursor was just getting stuck.
*The sound produced by any program or website (let’s say youtube) was doing the same thing as the mouse’s cursor used to : it was just gettin stuck.
That’s more or less everything. Hope i could help some of you..