My DVD drive has vanished.

[Dasquian Belargic]

My laptop is no longer willing to admit that I have a DVD drive. :confused:

It says that there are no drivers in place for it, but I don't know how to go about getting replacement drivers. The model is 'MATSHITA DVD-RAM UJ-841S'.

It was working fine last week and now has randomly just vanished. Haaalp.

[Lilaena De'Ville]

http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?t=180785 A quick google search turned up this. Apparently you're not alone. :)

[Dasquian Belargic]

:(

I tried System Restoring, but the only thing that achieved was corrupting my WoW files... so now I have to reinstall that without the use of a DVD-ROM. :headache

[Khendon Sevon]

The drive might... have died? Optical drives for laptops tend to be fickle and easily turned into a piece of non-working junk.

Does the drive slide out? If so, try taking it out then putting it back in.

Windows should auto-detect it. You shouldn't have to install any drivers on your own.

Then again, it would seem everyone is having problems with your drive. It appears the windows drivers don't particularly like it. Is it showing up as a CD-ROM drive or just not at all?

Try a windows update.

:(

Edit:

Bit more searching found your driver:

http://forum.rpc1.org/dl_firmware.php?download_id=2244 <-- click the 1.11 link to actually download it (evil not-totally-at-first-visible link).

[Dasquian Belargic]

^ That download doesn't apply to my drive, apparently.

[Khendon Sevon]

*blink*

Oh, how interesting :(

How long ago did you get the laptop? Is it still covered by the seller/manufacturer?

[Dasquian Belargic]

I think it should be. I suppose I'll have to send it off to the hideously inefficient tech people again :(

[Jaime Tomahawk]

It's almost certainly died and it aint coming back unless you have a loose cable inside the machine.

Device drivers corrupting is now so rare and in any case so obvious that I don't even bother looking at it as a reason. It just doesn't happen in Windows XP unless you have done something yourself like install a dodgy program that tries to update them with their own.

The simplest test is to take a bootable CD and.... boot off it. If it does not boot or even show up properly in BIOS, it's confirmed hardware issue. If it does boot, then confirmed working and then you fall back to checking drivers out and reversing last system changes etc.

[Morgan Evanar]

Yep, see if you can boot of a CD, never roll back if an optical drive dissapears.

Also, you can probably get a replacement drive for less than $30 US and install it yourself unless there is something special about the one in your laptop. If you need to send it in for something else, put the old one in.

[Dasquian Belargic]

Boot off a CD? :huh

[Morgan Evanar]

When you reinstall windows, you have to boot off the disc to do it. IE, instead of loading off the hard drive, it will scan the CD for a boot sector and load off that instead.

[Videl]

had that problem myself except it was the cd-rw drive....it just crapped out and we had to get another one.....

[Morgan Evanar]

had that problem myself except it was the cd-rw drive....it just crapped out and we had to get another one.....If it's in a desktop, that should be no more than a 5 minute job.

[Dasquian Belargic]

Well, it's fixed.

The downside is that I already bought an external drive. I had problems with that so the tech people there referred me to this Windows download that would tweak the registry some and remove some unwanted entries. So now I am left with an external drive I don't need! Doh.

[Morgan Evanar]

E-bay? England's craigslist equivilent??

[Bloodcrest]

Just out of curiosity, had you tried the part where you restore your system to a recovery point? If it's Windows XP, it should automatically set a recovery point every day. Sure, you might lose some of the work you may have been doing that day, but it usually works. Of course, now that you've fixed the problem, I guess it makes no difference, right?

[Dasquian Belargic]

That was one of the first things I tried, yes :)

Not to worry... I'll get rid of the drive somehow.