I have just finished a format and reboot of XP and now my dvd rom has vanished from my system. It worked during the reboot as this was the drive i installed from. it also worked while i installed other software.
In my computer it was listed as my d drive. However i went to play a dvd as the last system test and found that i have not got a dvd decoder installed.
Now the drive wont work. It shows up under my computer as 'other drive' with a red question mark.
The drive is also missing from device manager.

Any thoughts
Thanks
Dave

An update. I opened up my tower and jiggled the wires - no joy. I removed the drive completely and jiggled all the interconnecting ide and power cables and it worked. Twice in a row this evening i have re started and the drive worked.

The drive has power.....But now its gone again no trace of the drive anywhere.?????

is the DVD on the same IDE cable as the hard drive?

remove and reseat the IDE cable both ends

Hi Brain Damage
Thats what i did earlier and yes it is (same ide cable). I read another thread and have been into bios there seems to be no trace of the device in boot sequence it lists the boot sequence to be 1 A:, 2 cd rom, 3 c:, 4 disabled
however there is mention of the dvd in another area of bios (drives with removeable storage i think it was)

Ironically the damn things working again after re starting.

bios fault or dodgey drive, which is most likely?
Thanks

the boot sequence will be floppy, CD Drive then IDE 0.

try another IDE cable connected to the secondary socket on the motherboard and the connected to the DVD

I'll get an ide cable later this week and give it a go.

Some more information in the meantime.

On occasions windows takes ages to boot up (approx twice as long as normal) and when this happens the drive is missing, as it just has done so.
Thanks again for the advice
Dave