CD/DVD Drive Not Recognized

Hi Art,

Please follow my link below for the old upper and lower filter trick. I'm 80% certain that will fix your issue.

Osprey,

I ran the tool that you suggested and it did not detect a drive. Any ideas?

Art

Hello artvandalay1984,

Was there any power outage recently that has might affect your laptop? Have you made any firmware updates?
Here in this forum I've managed to find a link with information to similar problem as yours:www.dell.com/.../EN
You could use a virtual CD ROM emulator and then use it to mount a virtual CD drive. Then go to device manager, and you will see that the CD/DVD drive category has re-appeared for the "fake" drive. Select this category and scan for new devices. Your original CD/DVD drive should reappear on My Computer and Device Manager.

Hope that I helped.

KY_WD

Art,

Please check your BIOS (F2 at startup) and tell me if your DVD drive is detected there. It's possible the hardware has completely failed, but that's the first place to check.

You may try to update drivers with windows update.   Find "Control Panel", Click "System and Security" and choose "Windows Update". Choose drivers for your dell computer to update.

Hi Tom,

Since Windows uses the same generic drivers for all optical drives, updating the drivers does not apply. Regardless, since the device is not visible in device manager, the drivers couldn't be updated anyway.