Both removable drives vanished

Both removable drives--a DVD read-only player and a CD-RW burner--have completely disappeared on my Compaq desktop machine, running Windows XP Home edition, 512 MB DDR RAM and a P-4 Celeron processor. Prior to this incident, this machine had run flawlessly for more than a year. Other drives on this computer are the original HDD, designated C:\ divided into two partitions, and a user-installed second HDD, for backups, designated E:\. These drives and everything else on the computer functions properly at the present time.

By disappeared, I mean the drive letters do not show up in My Computer, the drives are totally absent from Device Manager, they will not read from any sort of media inserted into them, nor can any trace of the two drives be detected by any means I have tried. They do not show up in the BIOS when I enter Setup. Running the "Found New Hardware" wizard produces no results. The computer does not see them; it's as if they do not exist.

No new software was added, nor any other system configurations changed by me, between the time the drives functioned properly and when they disappeared. Running a full-system virus scan using Norton A/V 2004, with the latest virus signature up-grade, shows the system clean of viruses, as does Spybot 1.3 and Adaware Personal Edition 1.05. The Sandra system analyzer utility also cannot detect the drives.

*On boot-up, I can hear the DVD drive spin up, but the CD-RW drive is totally silent. Neither drive opens when the button on the front of the drive is pushed. Both drives are on the same ribbon cable by themselves--no other devices on that cable.

I opened the case and checked for good connection of ribbon and power cables on both drives. I disconnected the ribbon and drive cables, rebooted, then shut down and reconnected all cables and rebooted again. Still no drives. The "Found New Hardware" wizard did not come up. I replaced the ribbon cable with a new, unused cable--still no drives.

Obviously this leaves the possibility of the mother-board socket having suddenly gone bad or the coincidental, simultaneous failure of both removable drives.

*QUESTION: could one drive shooting craps, i.e., the totally silent CD-RW drive dying, also compromise the function of the DVD drive to the extent it will not register in My Computer nor read discs?

Does anyone have any other suggestions of what I can do, before the dreaded trip to the repair shop?

Any help will be much appreciated.

 

Hi

Check the jumper settings on the back of the drives. If one is set to Master the other should be set to Slave. Try reversing these settings. You could try setting both to Cable Select.

Try going into the BIOS/CMOS settings at startup and run "Detect Disk Drives" if it is available.

Matt

 

Interesting scenario - sorry to hear of your misfortune. After you've been through all the other suggestions presented, you can try each drive by itself jumpered as CS or master and hooked up to the terminating header of your secondary IDE cable. This may help to further isolate your problem. If that doesn't yield any clues, try connecting one of the drives (jumpered as CS or master) to the terminating connector of your other IDE cable with no other IDE devices present and head into your BIOS at startup - is the drive recognized? Now try the other one - is it too recognized? If yes, then your secondary IDE channel may be the problem. If no - its the drive or drives that are toast.

Lets verify that - Now put your HDD on the secondary IDE cable and again, head into BIOS at Start Up - is it recognized on the secondary cable? If the answer is yes, your opticals are toast. If the answer here is no, you have a problem with the secondary IDE channel and its time to purchase a PCI/IDE controller card to give you back another IDE channel or you can replace the Mobo (this assumes that your IDE cable is known to be in 100% good working condition as you attest). Be sure to verify that both IDE channels are and have always been enabled in your BIOS (they should be unless you recently went exploring in there and made some inadvertant changes). I'll also assume you checked all of your molex connectors too.

Good Luck.

 

Both removable vanished

Just a note to let everyone know that I very much appreciated the replies to my post about the removable drives.

After some thought I tried a technique that I once used when a second HDD I added to an old Gateway desktop and made the master drive did not show up in Windows 98. Win98 insisted on reading the original drive, which had been configured as the slave.

I had to unplug both cables to the original, smaller drive, reboot--which caused the new master drive to show up, shutdown and plug in the cables to the old drive, reboot again and both drives than appeared as they should.

With removable drives on my brother's Compaq desktop, I unpluged the second drive, which is the CD-RW, which, when I re-booted the computer allowed the DVD drive to show up, which worked perfectly. I then shut down and reconnected both cables to the CD-RW and rebooted. Shazam! The CD-RW drive also reappeared, also working perfectly.

Go figure. I have no idea what caused the problem in the first place. My brother is a very conservative user. Unlike me, he is not addicted to downloading tons of Internet goodies, installing and uninstalling, etc. But somehow or other, something must have gotten cross-whipadached software-wise in his system.

Hopefully my solution may help someone else with a similar problem.

Again, many thanks. This is really a great site, always one my choices (usually the 1st one) for any computer problem that has me stumped.

INTERESTING SIDEBAR: This vanishment, while exceedingly odd to me, apparently is not all that rare, at least on Compaq machines. Going to their online support site, I found a page that lists like 6 or 8 standard, major categories in their step-by-step troubleshooting wizard (we've all been through those one time or another, right?) One of those troubleshooting choice? YOUR REMOVABLE DRIVE WHICH HAD BEEN WORKING HAS SUDDENLY VANISHED.

 

tvjohns, good news that you got them going. Yes, posting back how you did it may help others, thanks.

From rereading your problem, I might just be concerned about one thing, the power supply. From the Compaqs I have looked at, they a somewhat minimal power supply. With all those drives that you have it may be approaching it's limits and a full demand (all drives and hardware running) may have pushed it too far.

I would open the case and check the rating on the PSU. You can get an indication of the total power requirement here:
http://www.jscustompcs.com/power_supply/

Matt