DVD Drives appear and dissappear?

I have two DVD Burners. Lately when I go into my computer one may be missing or both may be missing from time to time. Why this is I do not know.

Does anyone have any ideas? OR can I map local drives? Just curious...

Thanks,

Sportbikejunkie

 

Hi and welcome to the BBS,

I suppose they are IDE (Parallel ATA) drives, not SATA. Does your system have one IDE controller or two? (You might need to check the motherboard specifications). If it only has one IDE controller, one of the drives will be in the location that is normally reserved for a HDD, where the BIOS would look for OS boot partition. I don't like setting an optical drive in that location because I feel it could confuse the BIOS when it is searching for boot partitions (you could check the boot options in the BIOS/Startup settings, but there are all different types of BIOS).

The way the drives are jumpered could have an influence. They can be jumpered as master/slave or CS (Cable Select). If you look up the manufacturer's website of one of the drives there should be a (setup) instruction manual for download which will explain the jumper settings.

If you have a secondary IDE controller, most information I find suggests it is best to put the optical drives on that controller. I recommend trying the master/slave jumper setting arrangement, but setting CS is the alternative. Even reversing their arrangement may fix the problem.

Investigate those things, but it is probably likely that the BIOS is having trouble "setting" them at startup. Look in the BIOS for a setting "Quick Boot" or "Quick Start ", if you disable that, it will run full POST and may not overlook the drives. If it uses Quick Boot as default, it needs to have a good CMOS battery because it does not check all the hardware, it just tries to "remember" the configuration from the last startup and that is held by the CMOS battery.
(When full POST is run you should hear one beep before the OS starts to load.)

Matt

 

Thanks Matt,

I will look into and post my results.

Jimmer