DVD drive disappeared after Win 7 install

Oh, and just to add, I reset my laptop to factory settings and still no joy....but best of luck to you

Still here, still with the same problem...
I would really love to go back to factory settings with my laptotp, but this seems to be impossible for me cause I only have a couple of repair DVDs I made before switching from vista to XP.
Ok, now, of course I'm not Einstein, but enough smart to catch the fact that I can't go back to factory with the repair dvd without the dvd drive...
Anyone knows how to do this without the repair cd? I still have the vista partition intact because of the factory warranty that has expired just a couple of month ago. I'm just asking this because I would rather die in hell instead of go back to vista (portal ;D) and I didn't even tried to search anything about this. but if there is no alternative, I will accept to go back to vista just the necessary time to verify the functionality of my dvd drive and to insert the xp bootable cd.

Sorry for misstakes..

Wish you all a good start of the week.

Ax

It looks like lots of people are having a problem with disappearing optical drives in windows 7. I hope a real fix is found. What's frustrating for me is it's an intermittent. I've rebooted about 30 times since installing 7, and it breaks down like this:

50% of the time - no drive showing in explorer or device manager, drive isn't powered (but it's there in bios and works under XP)

20% of the time - windows explorer hangs, either when I try to look under my computer... or sometimes all by itself shortly after booting up.

15% of the time - drive shows up, but disappears the instant I try to explore the contents

10% of the time - drive shows up, and I can explore the contents of a disk. But after a few seconds it disappears. I even managed to get halfway through copying some files when the drive disappeared (giving me a copy error)

5% of the time - drive shows up as an unknown type of drive (not as a DVD/CD drive). Explorer won't show the drive capacity but gives it a drive letter. Disk manager doesn't give it a letter but shows 4GB of capacity.

So yeah, I tried all the usual fixes like the registry edit, the command line to disable signed driver checking, etc. The most promising fix seems like installing a new driver/firmware for the drive. But memorex's crappy site gives 404 not found errors when I click the links to download the drivers. I may end up having to buy a new drive.

Frostmourne on these forums found a fix that worked for me, so I hope this helps someone -

The fix was to simply plug the drive into a different SATA slot on the motherboard. Apparently windows (or maybe it's the mobo) doesn't like it when certain devices are mixed on the same channel. What worked for me was to make a non-booting sata drive the ch. 2 master and the DVD drive the ch. 2 slave.

Good luck.

Hi guys..
I ended up with giving back to acer my laptop. a few other problem appeared after a couple of weeks and I supposed there was a more complex hardware problem.
Now Acer still have my laptop at the customer care center, when it will come back I'll tell you all wich was the problem.
Cheers

v