CD drive dissapeared?!

[kkibak]

Thanks in advance to anyone who can help me out with this.

I have a laptop with a CD/DVD RW drive. I hadn't used the laptop for about a month, and recently sold it to a friend.

He called me up telling me the CD drive wasn't working. I figured he just didn't know how to use the computer (he's new to these things) so I had him bring it over.

The strangest thing is happening: the drive has completely dissapeared from the My Computer section, and nothing happens when a CD or DVD is put in.

Does anyone have any idea what this means or how it could have been caused? Another thing that is strange is that in My Computer I'm finding a "E:\ Memory Stick" drive. To the best of my knowledge (positive) there is NO memory stick or similar device attached.

Any help would be much appreciated by me and my buddy.

Thanks,
Kris

 

[kkibak]

oh, one other thing worth mentioning is that before I sold the computer to him I uninstalled / deleted as many of my programs / files as possible.

 

[kkibak]

sorry for all the posts, i just want to make sure i provide any relevant information.

If I go to device manager and then open up DVD/CD-ROM drives there is an "!" mark next to PIONEER DVD-RW DVR-12D

When I click properties it says "Windows successfully loaded the device driver for this hardware but cannot find the hardware device. (Code 41)

 

[bobohm]

I have same problem with my D3LL Dimentia 3000, yellow exclamation point on the DVD/CD , nothing works in the drive although it will open, and when I uninstall the device, it reinstalls on reboot as a Liteon Dvd , which it is, but then a warning that there was a problem installing this device and it may not work. So I swapped out the drive for 2 others, same thing, I swapped the IDE cables around so DVD was on IDE 0 and HD was IDE1 , system booted but still no working DVD. I put the DVD as slave on HD cable plugged back into IDE0 and it wouldnt boot, I even reset the BIOS defaults, any ideas ?

 

[iamjoe16]

are you running xp? I had a similar problem and i solved it by editing a few registry files.

 

[iamjoe16]

go to this link, they explain how to do it http://www.computing.net/hardware/wwwboard/forum/39248.html