Why does my DVD drive not work or show up?

[badass88gt]

So we bought this POS Acer laptop a while back, it runs Vista SP1. After about 5 months the DVD drive stopped working and it doesnt even show up under "My Computer". I bought a new drive from newegg, installed it and same thing, it doesnt show up and nothing happens when you insert a disc. Why is it doing this? Is it something in the motherboard, a driver issue, BIOS, etc???

Thanks for the help-Dan

[xxsn0blindxx]

It could be a bum IDE controller not recognizing the drive. Depending on the BIOS, you can usually go into the setup and see what drives it is detecting. If it detects the drive in the BIOS, then there's a good chance that it is a Windows problem, but if it isn't t's likely a motherboard problem. You can also try booting off a bootable CD or DVD to verify if the drive works. If it still does not work and you're confident that the replacement drive is correct, then you're looking at something on the motherboard being bad. Go into the BIOS setup and verify that the IDE controller is enabled. You could try re-flashing the BIOS, but that rarely is the fix. Also make sure that the connector on the new CD/DVD is the same as the old one and that there isn't an adapter board that gets mounted on the drive connector.

[Goat Roper]

If the IDE controller is bad it would show up in the device manager possibly. Check the device manager for your drive as well.

[y2kws6]

If the IDE controller is bad it would show up in the device manager possibly. Check the device manager for your drive as well.

You can also unistall it from the device manager and then click the plug & play to have it reinstall fresh.

Dan

[xxsn0blindxx]

Well try booting from a bootable CD, if it doesn't work then it is either a bad IDE controller or two bad DVD-Roms.

[badass88gt]

It doesnt even show up in the Device Manager.