DVD / CD-ROM drive sometimes doesn't appear in Device Manager

[accordeoniste]

My computer is a HP Pavilion dv6 notebook.

My DVD and CD-ROM drive hasn't appeared in Device Manager after an unexpected reboot. For example, lately I've seen the system crash when it overheats. The screen went black, and I needed to do a hard reboot to log back into Windows. I noticed that the DVD / CD-ROM device was no longer visible in Device Manager. I had to reboot the system and restart Device Manager before I saw the drive listed there again.

That's been the pattern. Even if I backed up the system and set the backup program to reboot upon completion, I'd have to reboot the system again before I saw the DVD / CD-ROM drive in Device Manager. And the drive doesn't function unless it's listed in Device Manager.

This didn't happen when I simply rebooted from the Start Menu, when a Windows Update caused the reboot, or when a similar predictable rebooting occurred.

Is there a logical explanation for this behavior, and what can I do to solve this problem?

 

[iko22]

Hi accordeoniste,

You might want to check Windows Explorer to see if you can see the DVD device there. If you use the Left Pane of Explorer to Navigate to the Computer Folder, then the Computer will scan and display all connected drives and, hopefully, will display the DVD drive there too.