Vanishing d: drive

Hi,

My d: drive (Matshitsa dvd/cd) on my Vista laptop (PackardBell EasyNote Skype edition) has vanished - and funnily enough, I want it back!

I'm not hugely tech savvy, but I've done some digging around on the net and found this a common problem for Vista and XP users.

I tried the obvious things: reboot, check for viruses, go back to an earlier restore point, check for the drive in Device Manager (but it wasn't listed) all to no result.

The standard solution is to delete the upper and lower filters from the registry. This I've done (though mine only had limits for one of them anyway, can't recall which though I think it was possibly lower), with no improvement. In fact, since deleting the registry entry, AnyDVD has started reporting that I have no drive to work with, which it wasn't doing before I tampered with the registry!

So, having failed all that and assuming it's not a hardware problem (I had installed and uninstalled various music and virus programs prior to the problem, while trialing new software, so I suspect somewhere in there I've stuffed some important connection; also, the drive still open, spins discs etc, so no obvious hardware issue)... what do I do?!

Please let me know any thoughts you have about how I could:
- recover my d: drive
- repair any damage I've done to my registry
- check that the drive itself still functions.

Thank you in advance for your time and help.

Daniel

 

Quick bump... still looking for a solution. Thanks.

 

:wave Welcome to Major Geeks! :major
To test the functionality of the drive, try booting to a CD of some type; your Windows install disc, a hard drive diagnostic, a memory diagnostic, a live OS like Knoppix or the UBCD4Win. If you can successfully boot to a CD, then you know the drive itself is OK and that the problem is Vista. Have you looked in the Device Manager under CD/DVD Drives? What's listed there? If you don't have a bootable disc handy, you'll need access to a functioning PC with a CD burner to create one....

 

Hi! Cheers for your help and sorry for the slow reply.

Tried booting from disc drive without success. Assumed this meant the problem was the drive, so bought replacement drive only to find that I can't locate this one either! :confused

Have looked in Device Manager and found no mention of the new drive, just like with the old drive.

Incidentally - and quite possibly unrelated - I've been unable to download the latest Windows update and can't update virus definitions for the latest version of ZoneAlarm Anti-Virus.

Still perplexed and verging on despairing; please help!

:crybaby

 

Do you see the drive as being listed in BIOS? Have you tried reseating the data cable connected to the motherboard? Can you try changing the data cable, it's a rare occurence but I repaired a friend's machine by changing the IDE ribbon though I assume yours is a SATA cabled drive. I had a power supply issue once and found that using a different power connector solved the problem. Good luck and let us know what happened.