Lost Optical Drives

This is a new one for me. I'm running an IBM Thinkcentre M50. I just installed a new hard drive and did a fresh load of Win XP Pro from an IBM restore disk I own. It was working fine, but suddenly I have lost my optical drives. I have checked all of the connections. I even unplugged the cable to the motherboard and restarted, then connected and restarted again. I have gone back to a restore point. There is no result.

I checked in Device Manager, and it does not show any CD/DVD drives and does not show the Secondary IDE controllers under the IDE ATA controllers tree.

Is there a way to correct this, or will I need to wipe the drive and reinstall XP all over again?

Is it possible that the Optical drives are turned off in the BIOS? I have not checked that yet.

 

Found it. Somehow, the BIOS was changed. IDE was set to primary only. When I changed it to 'both' and restarted, everything was back to normal. I guess it helps to check everything, even if it seems improbable.

This happened to me once before on another computer. The computer refused to boot. Eventually I discovered that the SCSU was disabled in the bios, so it wouldn't see the scuzzy boot drive. Another great adventure.

 

You might want to replace your CMOS battery. A quarter sized battery on the MB.