D drive

on my other pc my D drive disappeared what would cause this? and how can it be fixed without reloading win.

 

What OS is it?

 

Was your d:\ drive a harddrive or a cdrom or a dvd drive or a zip drive? If it were a cdrom or such then you should check in control panel/system/device manager and see if that specific component has a yellow exclamation mark next to it. If it does then you may need to reinstall it.

 

OS is operating system. And its a cd rom drive, but there is no software for this drive. It opens but it doesn't appear in the device manager or in my computer.

 

Hi. The CD-ROM should of come with a disk with drivers on it. Try re-installing them, they'll most likely work better for your CD-ROM than the Win95/98 driver. You should always state what windows OS you are using I still don't know, hope this helps

 

Sorry about not mentioning the os... It's ME. There wasnt any drivers that come with this cd rom drive. The only thing that come with it was burner software. thanks 4 your help

 

Had the same thing happen on two of my computers last week the cd drives disappeared I reran windows and got them back only to loose them a couple of hours later like something was taking them out as it booted up. Thought it was some sort of virus but nortons could only find a file it could not identify and then it finally quarentined the file and I was able to get everything to run again

 

Gard, so you think it may be virus related? By the way there isn't any virus protection on this specific computer, because i'm not the primary user.

 

It could be either the power or data cable came loose/off the back of the cdrom drive too...

 

The thing to do is to look in device manager and see if the CD ROM shows up? ME has a vast driver catalog so strange that it wouldn’t find the CD. Find out the name for the ROM, model etc. Go to www.driverguide.com and find out where to get the drivers from then re-install them. Windoze will occasionally loose drivers, never have figured out why but it does. If installing the drivers fails, crack the case open and check the connections actually do that first. Make sure the power is off when you do this! Not that it will bite you but you could bite it with static.

 

I would do the following in order:
Check the power and ribbon cable to the CD. Even if they look connected, diconnect and reconnect them. Try another power connector, if there are spares. If it's not appearing in device manager, it is not "connected" to the machine at the hardware level.
Check which channel it's connected to. If its on the same ribbon cable as the hard drive it's the slave drive on the Primary IDE. If it's on another ribbon cable by itself, or on the connector closest to the end on the motherboard, it's the master drive on the Secondary IDE. If it's on another cable with another drive, and it's at the end of the ribbon cable it's the slave drive on the Secondary IDE. Depending on which way it's connected there may be a jumper on the back of the drive, next to the power socket, indicating Master, Slave or Autoconfigure. The jumper may have come off. If it's not there, it may default to Auto or Master. If it's wired as such, it may not need to be there. In other words, if it defaults to master and it is the master, the absence of a jumper is OK.
Check the bios while it's booting. You may have a setting that enables the IDE or the CD itself.

Try disconnecting the power and ribbon cable from the drive and rebooting. Go to Device Manager and it should not be there. Shut down, reconnect the drive, and reboot. You should get a "New Hardware Found" message. If not, the drive may be dead.