CD Drives Not Recognized
 

My system no longer recognizes the 2 CD ROM drives installed in my puter. One is a player and the other is a player/burner. The player still has power and will open and close. My burner has stopped working altogether. I have checked to make sure the power is still connected to both, and it is. When I try to play a game I get the message: Disk is not inserted. Please insert disk and click OK.

Why don't they show up in the explorer or in the Device Manager? Does anyone have any suggestions?

Are they still plugged in correctly? (IDE cables connected to the drives, and to the board) Does the BIOS recognise them at boot time? (or from BIOS setup screen) Is the IDE controller still visible in Device Manager?

Otherwise we need to know a bit more about what's changed - have you installed/uninstalled anything recently, moved the computer, changed any other hardware? How are they normally connected? Both to the same IDE connector, or are they each on their own (and are any HDs connected to the same connector working?)

Have you added any new drives recently, a flash card reader, for example? I think only 4 IDE drives can be supported at any one time.

pull the cables and plug them back in, if not check the BIOS to see if that IDE channel was disabled.

I noticed the problem first when I installed new video card. Then I got a NIC card. It worked on and off for a while. Now nothing. The player will open and shut, but the burner doesn't respond at all.

try unplugging just the burner in case there's a fault with it and it's clogging up the IDE bus

Do you have windows 2000? Any error messages? If there are errors, google them and you will get an answer. I had a similar problem and had to delete aline out of the registry...then the were recognized

Are they a master-slave pair on one ribbon? Try unhooking one at a time and testing the one still connected...perhaps one has just gone on you and is dragging down the other.

Oh, yeah, try swapping out the ribbon cable...very often a bad cable is overlooked.