I have a laptop that has a cdrw/dvdrom drive that suddenly stopped working. i looked in the device manager and the drive is not even listed to be on the computer. I dont understand this considering it worked a couple days ago. Any ideas on what to do would be great. thanks.

ok. pardon me for asking this but since the drive was last working has the laptop been knocked hard or dropped at all?

The reason for my asking this is that by the sound of it the IDE cable may well have become dislodged slightly. Does the laptop detect the Drive in its Bios setup? if not then the cable being knocked is more than likely.

If it detects it in Bios, go into the windows device manager and use the 'scan for hardware changes utility' hopefully this should pick the drive up. sometimes u need to install drivers first.