Disappearing Cd-Drive

[Hobo]

My friend is running windows XP home edition and his Cd Drive Dissapeared! His computer will not recognize it as being there and will not autoplay anymore. Does anyone know what's wrong with it?

[EpidemiK]

And I thought I was the only one having this problem with XP Home .. :mad:

[Dean]

Does the BIOS reconise it?

[Rick]

I had a similar problem...
In my configuration, I had three HD's and one CD-RW, with the CD-RW set as the secondary slave drive.
XP would see the CD for a short while after boot-up, but within less than an hour, the CD would disappear from the system altogether. The only way I could get it back was to reboot.
Then I added another HD, and a DVD-ROM and had to add another IDE controller card.
I shuffled things around so the CD-RW was set as secondary master, and the DVD as secondary slave, with the HD's set as primary slave/master and the remaining HD's on the add-on controller. I haven't had any problems with it since.
Somewhere along the line, I read an article about XP and some controller/drive combinations. I can't recall the exact details, but the gist of it was that XP frequently doesn't like an IDE drive and an ATAPI drive on the same channel, so try moving the CD off of the IDE channel containing the HD and see if that helps

[notnamed]

My XP Pro had a problem earlier with a HD and an ATAPI CDROM on the same channel, so I removed the HD which I wasn't really using and it worked fine. I added it back recently and I've had no problems. The CDROM is secondary slave, HD secondary master (only because the HD is so old it doesn't have any select jumpers on it, it's always master...)