Internal DVD drives.

[glocko]

My comp seems to have 'forgotten the fact that there are two internal DVD drives connected.
One is the integral one that came with the machine, the other is one that I put in myself.
Absolutely no problems for two years but now they don't come up on the my computer screen.
Any ideas what's wrong
thanks chaps

[greenlandy]

First check that windows hasn't dropped any device drivers: Right click my computer, select properties click on the hardware tab then device manager. Anything wrong in here will be obvious normaly a yellow triangle.

[aldi]

Any luck?

[thepassenger]

Daft question, but do both drives eject when you push the button?
If not, I'd suggest Windows can't see it because one of them has died.

[glocko]

Both devices do eject and the little light comes on when you put a disc in.
when I looked in the device manager all the dvds (including the cd rom I took out to put the second DVD in) have the warning yellow sign next to them.
It says that the comp has the driver but can't find the hardware!!
troubleshoot gave me the option of checking they were attached correctly and faff all else.
?????

[greenlandy]

Grab the bull by the horns and have look inside. Leave the tower plugged in but switched off at the wall (the tower is now earthed) take the cover off and unplug the power leads that go to your dvd drives and then plug them back in, do the same with the ribbon cables try and get a straight a pull as you can so no pins are bent. Resart your pc (leave the side off if you want but keep fingers, pets, young children etc away) do your drives work now? If not we need to check the voltage on the power leads going to the drives. Black is ground, yellow is 12v and red is 5v. If you don't no how to test the voltage ask someone who does!!

If you have a spare drive or no someone with a spare drive you could just pop that in to see if it works.

[annodomini2]

greenlandy said:

Grab the bull by the horns and have look inside. Leave the tower plugged in but switched off at the wall (the tower is now earthed) take the cover off and unplug the power leads that go to your dvd drives and then plug them back in, do the same with the ribbon cables try and get a straight a pull as you can so no pins are bent. Resart your pc (leave the side off if you want but keep fingers, pets, young children etc away) do your drives work now? If not we need to check the voltage on the power leads going to the drives. Black is ground, yellow is 12v and red is 5v. If you don't no how to test the voltage ask someone who does!!

If you have a spare drive or no someone with a spare drive you could just pop that in to see if it works.

Sound advice, but first there may be a simpler solution, 1. Do you have kids or someone who may have 'messed' with the machine?

If the answer is yes:

1. On power on you should get a message, Press 'F1' or 'Del' to enter Setup or some such.

Press the appropriate key and enter the BIOS Setup screen.

Somewhere there will be IDE settings (this is the connection your drives use), (check you motherboard manual, if you have one, or download it off the net), I am guessing it is a fairly modern machine and so there will be an option on the drive connections for Auto-Detection or just 'AUTO', check that all are set to this value.

Highly recommend not changing anything else at this stage!

Press F10 to Save and Exit (Standard function across 99% of PC's).

Now do you get a splash image on startup?

If so turn it off, in the BIOS, see your manual and do the next part.

If not then the drives that are connected should be listed on power up, if the DVD drives are connected then they should appear in the list (usually 4 of Primary/Secondary Master/Slave : "Drive name"

The Drive name on DVD drives will usually say 'DVD' along with model numbers etc.

Are they displayed?

If so and you still cannot see them, its a windows software problem.

If not, check your connections as above.

If you still have problems after checking connections then something is probably broken.

[greenlandy]

If they can be seen in device manager the bios is normaly not at fault.

[annodomini2]

greenlandy said:

If they can be seen in device manager the bios is normaly not at fault.

Missed that part sorry,

But usually if this is the case its not usually connections either as they are usually there or not, sounds like either a driver or firmware/hardware problem.

[thepassenger]

To be honest if they're ejecting and spinning the disk up (light flashing) yet Windows is in device manager says the device driver is corrupted/missing and one assumes that the drives appear fine in the BIOS?

Are both drives on the same cable?

If so I'd suggest that it's either a) the cable b) the controller on the motherboard is shot c) Windows has some how corrupted the driver it uses for 32-bit protected mode access.

c) is the most annoying btw as it could be StarForce (copy protection), malware, or just "one of those things".