Missing optical drive... none of the fixes work

[CreeDo]

I have an Acer Power FH system with a Memorex CD/DVD optical drive.
Was using Windows XP and just did a clean install of 7 on a new drive.

The drive doesn't show up in my computer, or in device manager. It was available in XP and shows in BIOS. It showed briefly the first time I booted into windows 7, but when I double clicked it, it disappeared and never came back.

Maybe relevant: - it's a PATA drive and I'm using an adapter to connect it to one of the SATA slots on the motherboard. Dunno if it matters but it's set as a slave on channel 3, with the win7 boot drive being the master on channel 3. My other drives, both PATA and SATA, are showing up ok.

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Fixes I've googled that don't work:

· Removing upperlimit and lowerlimit registry entries at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}

· Disabling driver signing verification under the windows 7 boot options

· Manually disabling via command line with bcdedit -set loadoptions DDISABLE_INTEGRITY_CHECKS

· Downloading windows updates, including
Download details: Update for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems (KB974332)

· Showing hidden devices in device manager, scanning for new hardware, useless windows troubleshooter.

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Am I hosed or what? Time to buy a new drive? Maybe rearranging things so the drive is connected via IDE cable?

 

[garysgold]

Hello CreeDo,

Welcome to Seven Forums.

There may be a setting in bios to activate the sata port.

Hope this helps.

Gary

 

[Pauly]

Check disk management to see if drive is showing up
Right click my computer>manage>disk management

Or from a command prompt type, diskpart, list disk and see what comes up should show you drive and tell you drive status ie online/offline/error

Hope this helps

 

[CreeDo]

Thanks for the ideas so far...

gary - Does that mean enabling the particular sata slot I've got it plugged into? I know that sata slot works... also sometimes I've seen the drive appear on a couple of occasions for just a few seconds. If activating the port can still work, where is that in bios usually?

Pauly - it's not in disk management. Since my original post I installed some windows updates, and on the next reboot the drive showed up twice... once as an unknown drive type, and on the next boot as a CD/DVD drive. In both cases, the drive disappeared after a few seconds. In the second case it actually let me copy a couple of files then disappeared in the middle of the copy, causing an error.

 

[Pauly]

Generally in bios sata ports can be set to work in different modes normally raid/ide/ahci try changing between achi and ide see if it helps, have you doubled check the drive is connected properly all plugs are pushed fully home, try unplugging and replugging nothing to lose

 

[Frostmourne]

Change the channel. It appears your motherboard doesn't support 2 devices on the same channel. Either that or buy a new optical drive with a SATA interface.

 

[CreeDo]

WHOA. Frostmourne. You are THE MAN. Seriously. You are definitely my hero for at least the next week.

This problem is so common and so few good fixes are posted. I just swapped two of the sata connections so that they're on different channels and it's golden. All other drives are still there. Hopefully it sticks. Thanks so much! Was driving me nuts. Thanks also to the other posters in this thread.

 

[CreeDo]

AGHHH bump :/

It isn't fixed. It consistently disappears shortly after boot.

Memorex support sucks for the drive... after lots of digging I found links to firmware updates for my drive. Every link is 404. I searched google for the filenames of these drivers and found only one out of 4. That one failed to work (an error about the drive not being found).

In short, the drivers are either impossible to find or suck, and without them I can't seem to keep this drive from disappearing in windows 7. It will appear and work for a short time. I don't know what changes to make it disappear. It's gone in device manager too.

Help?

 

[Frostmourne]

I'd replace the drive with a brand new SATA model - the one I bought is a GH 22 series, and no it does not have Bluebird.

 

[CreeDo]

Frost, thanks for checking back in on it. I'm probably going to have to end up doing that. It kills me though, throwing away a perfectly good drive. It's just a software issue, it worked (and still works) great in XP.

Right this second, it's working fine. It just stops after a little while and disappears.

Is there any use knowing this bit of info? In event viewer I can see when it disappears. There's an error from the service control manager. The error isn't helpful, just says "The following boot-start or system-start drivers failed to load: cd-rom"

 

[JonM33]

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.

 

[CreeDo]

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?".

 

[Frostmourne]

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.

 

[CreeDo]

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 :/

 

[Frostmourne]

Update the firmware if you can too.

 

[CreeDo]

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.

 

[Frostmourne]

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.

Didn't you connect to IDE before?

 

[CreeDo]

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.

 

[bobsch]

Reading CD Crashes Windows Explorer

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?

 

[whest]

Post your system specs bobsch