Windows 7: Dvd drive disappearing and reappearing

Ok I have a Dell Inspiron 1545 and my dvd drive keeps coming and going. The drive is a TSST TS-L633B 12.7 SATA Trayload 8X DVDRW. The pc is a dual core pentium with 3gb ram. When loading a dvd the drive will show up and then shortly disappear. Sometimes it will stay longer but if i pause a dvd it will disappear again and i have to either reboot or open and close the tray to get it to recognize again. I have removed the driver from device manager and i have tried updating the driver with the latest windows 7 drivers from dell with no luck. When i try to flash the drive with the latest the driver it will be there but when opening the flashing program is disappears again. I have even gone the route of getting a replacement drive from dell and it does the same exact thing.

I have gone and tried the upperfilters and lowerfilters and that did no change either. I have checked the bios and the drive shows up in the bios.

I am at a complete loss. Any help would be appreciated

Thanks

Mark

I have a TSST 623, and it happens infrequently. The only solution I ever devised was to reboot the machine.

Perhaps, you are describing Hide Empty Drives.

From Explorer - Organize, Folder and Search Options (or ALT - Tools, Folder Options)
Hide Empty Drives in the computer folder

Also, an upgrade to the most current build may address the problem.

Current chipset driver?

Hello Mark, welcome to the forum.
I suggest a couple trouble shooting techniques. If you are game here is what we would suggest you do:

• reboot your system and enter the Bios and check to see what your boot priority shows, you should see the HD as priority 1, cd/dvd as priority 2 or a floppy etc. But the main thing we are looking for is that the Bios sees your CD/DVD player.
• If the Bios does recognise you optical drive the next area we suggest is to trouble shoot your device manager. Go to control panel, look for "Device Manager" on the top right of your monitor and double click, your device manager will show you the status of all your plug & play devices, look for your cd/dvd player and click on the small dismond on the left and this should expand the device, if there are no conflicts or driver errors then OS 7 recognizes the drive. If there is a small hazard warning sign in yellow with an exclamation mark then the drive is not recognized and that is an easy fix.
• If device manager recognizes the cd/dvd drive then we must look at Dynamic Memory Access AKA DMA or Ultra DMA, normally if windows has recognized the drive it will automatically configure it for UDMA. But on the off chance that it did not you can do this setting from the device manager.
• Last suggestion would be to go into device manager and remove/uninstall the drive and reboot and see how windows senses the new hardware and begins to install it.

Give it a try, we'll be out and about and will check back to see how you are coming along.

Regards,
Adrian

Sorry to bump in on an un-related topic, am I able to get a newer build then buid 7100?
Regards,
Adrian

Here is something - i m not sure whether its applicable or not - i recently reinstalled a copy of vista which works similarily in this situation - if you have AHCI enabled in the bios it automatically installs the intel driver when you install the OS the same as with Windows 7. But to get full functionality for the dvd drive i needed also to install the intel matrix driver - i noticed this when i tried to install a game it would load a bit then sieze up for 10 minutes and so on, so i cancelled the install, and installed the intel matrix storage driver software, and dvd player works normally again - so i would check your bios settings under sata configuration if you think your drive maybe affected by this.

Also a very good point!
Well done.

Seems like the problem is fixed. Thanks whest for the info on the intel matrix driver that seems to fix everything. Also thanks to everyone elses replies. If it wasnt for forums like this we would all suffer.

Hello Friends,

I also have almost the same problem. I upgraded my system from Vista to windows 7 (32 bit) but after installation I realized that my CDRom doesn't work properly. It disappears when not in use. Meaning when I insert a cd it reads the cd but after a while it disappears from the my computer as well as from device manager. As per the instructions above, I tried to install Intel matrix drive I could not find that. So please help.

Prakash

You will find it at the intel site - http://downloadcenter.intel.com/default.aspx
Select chipsets - chipset software - intel(R) matrix storage manager - Select Operating System - select Windows 7 (64bit OR 32 bit) - select drivers - select intel(R) matrix storage manager 8.9.0.1023 - download and install.
(make sure you don't download the floppy configuration utility by mistake) - it will show up if you select utilities.

Here is your driver page if you need any more drivers - note the driver is also on this page:
http://support.ap.dell.com/support/d...ng=en&TabIndex=