Problem with CD-RW drive

[Satsuki]

soooo.....about a month ago, I started up my computer, went to play a CD, and promptly heard nothing, so I went to My Computer to open up the D Drive manually. Magically, my drive was gone, and searches for it gave an error message of "d:/ refers to a location that is unavailable." wow, thanks windows, you're so helpful these days. anyway, the drive itself still has power (little green light is on, opens and closes) and everything is plugged in where it should be. But nothing detects it, and I can't use it at all. Cry. Borrowed a friend's drive and put it in, just to see if it was a problem with that specific one or what, and still the same problem occured. Any ideas?

[Rhydant]

It could be the IDE port on your motherboard. If thats the case, you're screwed.

Try plugging in your CD drive to the other IDE port (Its the wide thing on the mother board that you connect drives to via a ribbon cable). If the drive works, then its most likey your mother board thats causing the problem.

[Calliander]

It could be the IDE port on your motherboard. If thats the case, you're screwed.

Try plugging in your CD drive to the other IDE port (Its the wide thing on the mother board that you connect drives to via a ribbon cable). If the drive works, then its most likey your mother board thats causing the problem.

Make sure that it isn't the one your HD is connected to.

However, before doing that, pop in your Windows disc and see if the computer will boot from it. If it does, you have a software issue with Windows.

[cka]

could be a shitty ide cable too, try with another one

[Wildkat]

Delete the IDE drivers from device manager, reboot, let windows re-install them.

[Mykozo]

could be a shitty ide cable too, try with another one

This should always be the first step when you have device issues. Nothing is more annoying than sitting there twiddling around in the control panel for an hour trying to fix a device, only to find that the cable is bad.
Did the drive just stop working? Or was it a new drive that you put in? Make sure that you have it set to slave if it is on the same IDE channel as your sys drive. If you have another CD(RW) drive on the same IDE channel, first make sure one is slave and the other master. Then, if it still doesn't work, try the opposite slave/master config. I have had wierd problems in the past with certain CDR's/drives not working when set to the proper slave/master status, but working the other way around. I have no good explanation as to why this happened, I'm just glad it worked.

[Spiders Kidsmoke]

Try another IDE cable...