CD-ROM drive? Which CD-ROM drive?

[pne]

For some reason, my computer has decided not to recognise its two CD-ROM drives when it started up.

When this started happening, I thought I'd try detaching the cable from the motherboard and plugging it in again; that worked, kind of. At the next boot, the system recognised both drives again. But afterwards, they were gone.

This morning, for some reason, it decided to recognise them again. Bizarre.

I wonder whether the computer is simply getting old (perhaps some capacitors going wonky?). It also decides to freeze occasionally. Perhaps that's its way of saying "I'm just a piece of consumer equipment and am not designed to last more than two years; please spend lots of money on a replacement". *sigh*

Comments

[pne.livejournal.com]

Hm. Why should it be intermittent, though? And after having happily recognised them for literally years?

*puzzled*

[missysedai.livejournal.com]

Bleh. Mine did that for a while. Judicious application of favored swear words and threats of percussion repair helped for a while.

Then I was forced to re-install Windoze one afternoon, and the problem vanished. Dumb machines, anyway.

[sovereigna.livejournal.com]

That happened to my parents computer too.. I did the same thing, checking cables, swapped cables.. reinstalled them, updated drivers.. they'd be there then not, then be there then not..

Ended up reinstalling windows :)
No problems since.. (not including windows itself :D)

[pne.livejournal.com]

Hm.

Though I'm not sure how reinstalling Windows is going to help if the BIOS doesn't detect them during boot-up -- long before the operating system is loaded from disk.

I hope I won't end up having to do that anyway.

[sovereigna.livejournal.com]

Granted.

However I don't know much about the BIOS. So I'm afraid I don't have any more ideas..

When you figure it out, let me know what you did?

[nik-w.livejournal.com]

Sounds like my dad's old computer - it stopped recognising one of it's hard drives (which was only used to store backups of stuff). I left it alone, as the computer isn't in a place that makes it easily to access. Some 6 monhts later it randomly decided to see the harddrive again and continued to do so for another few weeks before "losing" it again. Most strange.