Problem with CD drives disappearing

[bosox188]

Both of my CD drives have disappeared from Windows. I went into device manager and there are no drives listed there, only my 2 hdd's. Also, when the computer boots, it reads both hdd's but then just stays on that screen without starting to Windows, and the cd drives (They should be secondary IDE) do not come up. I can hit ESC to get past the screen and load Windows, or if I wait 2 minutes it just goes into Windows on its own. In BIOS it also does not show any CD drives. The last thing I did was I burnt the ISO image of the Vista Beta 2 x64 and booted from the DVD and installed Vista. I noticed the problem once it rebooted. The drives do not show up in anything, not in XP, Vista, or BIOS. It's like they're completely gone. Has anybody heard of this happening? I googled but could not find a problem where BIOS cannot read the drive either.

 

[Barney Fife]

Make sure that jumpers are removed from CDs, to be cable select, make sure Both CDs get separate power cables from PSU, make sure power is in and the pins aren't broken missing or bent, make sure data cable is attached to MB and no pins are bent broken or missing.
If everything there is OK, clear Cmos by either jumper or removing battery for 5 mints minimum.

Good Luck.

 

[mr spoon]

I had my optical drives disappear from Windows when I installed new hardware once, it was a TV card that turned out to be faulty, I'm guessing that it was some form of conflict that caused it. I'd recommend either swapping round the IDE cables (so that each drive is still secondary, but on the other channel - this has worked for me before) or using a restore point in Windows to see if that restarts them.

 

[bosox188]

Yeah I guess I'll check the cables today, I don't think its Windows just because BIOS can't detect them either, so I think it must be a bigger problem than just a Windows error.