CD drive disappearing

The shop where I work frequently gives out loaner laptops to customers that are having extensive repairs done. We do this so that they are not totally down for any amount of time. So, on Saturday, we gave a guy a loaner laptop. He brings it back on Monday saying the DVD drive doesn't work. After popping in a CD and getting no action, I opened My Computer and saw that the DVD drive has completely disappeared. No big deal (usually), this is generally an easy fix, so due to time constraints, I simply gave him a 2nd loaner. This was Monday evening. Tuesday evening he brings THAT laptop back saying the same thing has happened! How is this guy knocking out the optical drive functionality in all these laptops? The first laptop was a Dell, and simply restarting using "Last Known Good Configuration" resurrected the CD/DVD drive. However, this 2nd laptop (a Compaq) is not so fortunate. I tried "Last Known Good Config", I tried a System Restore to 2 weeks ago, I tried using the New Hardware Wizard. One strange thing: when I ran system restore, it popped a message saying something about "changes made to drive D: before the system restore won't be reversed" or something.... this is weird. The device manager does not even show the CD/DVD drive. This drive is still functional: I can boot to it. The drive appears in the BIOS. How do I get the drive back in Windows without having to do a clean install of WinXP? Oh, I also tried the reg 'hack' listed in this thread, and it didn't work....
:banghead

 

Does diskmgmt.msc show it as a device? My guess is that the drive letters got mixed up. Only a guess mind you, since we run into this issue all the time with mapped network drives and media card readers.

 

Sorry about the delay in responding - been busy - due to time constraints, we simply reformatted and reinstalled the OS. yeah, not a real "fix" but it got the job done, and data backup was a non-issue, so a clean install was the quickest 'no-brainer' way to deal with this... however, I'll keep the "diskmgmt.msc" in mind for the next time this happens, and it will happens again!
LOL