Computer won't recognize CD&DVD drives

[OneArmedScissor]

My mother has a Dell 8400 P4 3.0GHz computer. She's complained for some time to me that the computer won't detect/recognize the PATA0 and PATA1 drives (the two optical/rom drives). Basically, whenever the computer reboots and is loading, before it gets to the windows loading screen, it will say that it doesn't detect the two dvd drives. When in windows, I look under My Computer for the drives and they do not appear.

Any suggestions?

 

[sPlAtOiD]

Well go to start, control panel, system, hardware, device manager and see if you have either a yellow exclamation mark or a red X if so something is wrong with the drives.
I would also take the side off and look to see if the cable to the drives came loose from the main board. Before you touch anything inside make sure and touch some metal first to ground yourself.
If they are plugged in OK then try to go back to device manager and uninstall on of the drives and restart, it will reinstall the drive.
If it works do it with the other drive also.
If none of this works you could try a firmware update from the vendor web site.

 

[OneArmedScissor]

The drives are all connected, etc. In device manager, they do not appear at all. However, each drive opens and closes.

 

[Nick]

the fact that that they open and close only means that they drives are connected to the power supply and they have power going into them

 

[S0ULphIRE]

Either right click on mycomputer and select manage, or go into control panel/ administrative tools/ computer management
then select disk management. If you can see the cd drives there, right click and enable it.

If that doesnt work, get a different IDE cable