Basically Vista has been working fine for the past 5 months and recognizing my disk drive and letting me burn CD's. Now all of a sudden it doesn't even recognize that there is a CD drive and thus I cannot run any of my games or burn any new CD's.

I haven't updated the firmware of anything when it happened so that isn't the problem, nor have I installed any new software. Also the drive still opens and closes and I can hear it spinning when I put something in.

Any advice on how to get it to show up. I'm going to try to boot into Windows XP and see if it recognizes the drive to see if its a hardware problem or not.

just a quick thought, it might not solve the problem but maybe your laser on the drive needs cleaning. I would recommend purchasing a DVD Drive cleaner disk - worth a try! Hope this helps.