Did you try replacing the optical drive? Seriously, those things do wear out over time. Over the past 10 years (starting with a 4X CD burner) I have gone through at least 20-25 optical drives. At least they are only $30 now where they were $100+ in the past.
I'll end up replacing it for sure, but I remain convinced it's not the hardware because it worked great in XP up to the day I installed 7. And it worked great today when I burned my DVD. Hours later I come back to my PC and it's disappeared as usual.
I guess I haven't bitten the bullet yet on a new drive because I keep hoping someone will come up with the miracle fix... like memorex support will respond to my emails asking for the firmware update, or a windows update will improve the cdrom.sys driver, or someone on the forum will say "did you try this obscure registry tweak?" or "did you try wiggling the sata cord just so?".
Download Autoruns and look through the tabs to find an entry for the cd-rom.sys driver. Enable it and restart. Then, uninstall any cd-burning apps such as Nero and reboot. Lastly triple check the connections and status in the BIOS.
Frost - found it in the services section of autoruns, and it's enabled already... I uninstalled nero and restarted... no luck. Drive is always there when I reboot, both in bios and in windows. Always goes away after a few hours.
found some registry keys for the cdrom.sys driver at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\cdrom but I can't see anything useful that might do anything :/
Update the firmware if you can too.
So tech support provided a firmware update but it was either the wrong update or failed to work with the drive (even though the drive was currently showing).
I realized I was only using one of my two IDE connections, so using the IDE-to-sata adapter was pointless. I disconnected it from the optical drive and plugged it into my IDE cable, jumpering it to be a slave to the other IDE drive. Now it's been working fine all day and I think it's safe to say the problem is solved, though it woulda been nice to know why it had problems connecting via sata.
The last time I had this drive connected via IDE was with windows XP. I switched to connecting via sata (also under XP) to make room for a new IDE drive. If you ask me why I didn't get a new sata drive, or why the optical drive is the one I chose to use with the sata adapter... all I can tell you is that I was ignorant.
I removed that new IDE drive when I noticed how crowded my tower was getting and never thought to reconnect the optical drive to the IDE cable. Until installing win. 7 forced me to.
I also have a problem with my PATA DVD/CD drives being "missing." I know the drives are OK because I used the master drive to install Windows 7, but when I try to install software from either drive Windows Explorer crashes and I have to turn off the computer with the power switch.
With no CD in the drive, I get the normal right click options. When I insert a CD, I get a constant hour-glass and have no control.
I tried switching autoplay between on and off, but that didn't help.
Any ideas?
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