My DVD drive has gone

I have an Advent 7011 and ever since I tried to access the CD burner on my home network from my laptop the DVD drive has gone. there is no record of in in My Computer, no drive is found when In windows media player etc. When I put a CD in the drive runs and the light comes on inside.

I have looked in the BIOS and it just says that the first drive for boot up is disabled.

help!

 

Does it show up in Device Manager?

 

No it is as though it was never there!

 

What OS are you using?

 

Windows XP

 

Is the drive showing up in the BIOS?

 

I get to the BIOS by pressing del on start up but I cannot seem to find an option that shows any of the drives. I can only seeem to find the Boot up option.

 

Does it detect it when you run the add/remove hardware wizard in controlpanel?

 

No it does not.

 

When I enter the Standard CMOS Setup there is no mention of a CD drive only the Floppy and Hard Drive

 

Is this on your laptop or your home computer? If on your laptop is it removable? maybe it is slight out of alignment or not making good connection, if its your home computer you can try to move it to a different IDE port or as a secondary as a slave to see if it shows up again in the bios, if bios doesn't see it, then Windows never will.

 

Everything is working against me on this one. It is in my laptop and it is not removable. This is the last time I compromise and buy a cheap laptop from PC World! I did not realise the implications of buying a lap top where none of the drives are removable. They have quoted me £150 just to look at the laptop and then probably a lot more if the drive needs replacing. I was hoping that it may just be a setup problem.