Hi Colin,

Welcome to site

Have you tried using drives on different usb ports ?

Have you tried drives in another computer to check they still work ? I have an external drive here which stopped working on a customers PC.

Have you tried any other devices in the usb ports ? USB ports may have failed.

Please let us know how you get on.

Denis

Hi Denis I took HP drive to work today a used it without problems. I have checked all the USB ports and they recognize everything I connect to them. I also checked internal LG drive in another computer and again it worked fine.

I have uninstalled driver from LG but it fails to be recognized on reinstallation in computer. I have even brought a new cable to connect the internal one.

Colin

I had similiar problem, Vista Ultimate, lost my DVD drive 'E' and my virtual drive overnite!!! Searched many forums and that's how I landed here. Tried several solutions from the various forums. Most did not work. Seems its an update issue. "I think". I uninstalled several programs that I hardly use and one update, KB936181. Rebooted and got my DVD and virtual drives back. That particular update has been a problem. It always shows as available update although update history shows it was installed 20 times. I went to Control Panel, Uninstall Programs and it showed as being installed. I removed it.

Also I have my update set for "notify" only. I decide if I want to install a particular update. Its good practice to only install one update at a time and then see it your computer is working fine before going on to the next one. Takes some time but its a safer method. If you install more than one update at a time and your computer developes a glitch you don't know which update was the culprit.

Hope this helps someone as I like to repay for all I get from these various forums. Oh yea, my next computer Im buying in Feb 08' I will remove Vista and install XP Pro.
Andy

I had a similar problem when I first installed my XP Pro on my dual boot XP/Vista machine. I plugged in my Sandisk thumb drive (which has this virtual CD drive in it that auto launches this menu thing) and then my DVD RAM drive disappeared!

Unfortunately, the only way I could fix it was to reinstall the OS- which wasn't a big deal since I just installed it a few hours before.

Does BIOS still recognize your CD drive? It did in mine, but windows didn't. Howbout the external drive?

However, before doing this, I recommend updating, as Andy suggested, and perhaps running a few useful apps. If your version of Vista is 32 bit, you may be able to use Dial-a-fix http://wiki.djlizard.net/Dial-a-fix.

It fixes many known windows problems.

You may also want to try Microsoft's safety scanner: http://onecare.live.com/site/en-us/center/whatsnew.htm

To check for a variety of malware, clean up your registry, and do some other useful things.

For kicks, you should probably try running Trendmicro Housecall for a better check against malware and viruses

housecall.trendmicro.com


If those don't help, try booting off of your vista DVD (assuming bios still recognizes your drives) and assessing your options from there. The Vista DVDs are a lot more helpful for troubleshooting than the XP CD's were- they'll check out your system and do other useful things. Try running some of those checks (I'm not too familiar with all of them, but I remember it was pretty straightforward- I only did this once).

If its still a no-go, try doing a repair installation of vista.

As a final measure, a complete reinstall would most likely solve your issue, but SAVE THIS FOR LAST!

*note* Before beginning any of this, its probably best to back up your important files and folders onto some external media. Just in case.

All the best, and get back to us!

--The Comodore

Hi there, I don't know too much about computers and I need some help. I recently went to burn some photos onto a disk and my cd/dvd rom drive is missing from my computer. I can still open and close the disk slot but the drive doesn't show up on there at all and it says that I don't have one when I put the disk in. I sent my computer into the plave I had bought it from a year ago and they said they ran their program on it to fix it and couldn't and apparently I have 88 things of spyware on there and 2 viruses . They said that they could basically reformat it for a price and I declined. I'd rather not reformat unless that was my last option and I'm hoping that it's not. Here's the info I am getting from my device manager:

LITE-ON DVDRW LH20A1P ATA Device

Windows cannot load the device driver for this hardware. The driver may be corrupted or missing. (Code 39)

Click 'Check for solutions' to send data about this device to Microsoft and to see if there is a solution available.

I checked for solutions and of course it couldn't find any. Please, please can someone help me out here? What can I do to fix this??

Sincerely, Krista

Open device manager.
Right click on computer > manage. Click on device manager > locate your optical drive right click and uninstall/remove it. Next restart and test it. if it doesn't work Next thing to do is remove the upper and lower filters http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929461/en-us
Restart if this doesn't work try updating your drives firmware.

As for spyware/malware and virus you can run spybot Search & destroy after updating to the latest definitions and remove any threat found. Also ad-aware se personal would be great as well. You can find those on dowload.com and searching. Locate the file with the stars next to it.

**Use my suggestions at your own risk **

I am sure this should solve your problem

Hey caperjack that is included in my post

deleted it ,sorry ,misted in your post i guess