Cannot find CD/DVD drive on Inspiron 1720 laptop on Vista OS

Hi All,

I am a newbie and looking for solutions on the problem I currently have on my Dell Inspiron 1720 laptop with a Vista Ultimate 32-bits. I had this laptop for about 18 months now but all of a sudden I cannot see the drive on the Operating System anymore. Also when it boot up I get an error message saying system could not read a device and to power down and power back up, or press the Esc button to continue. I could not even see the CD/DVD drive on Device Manager either. Does this mean the drive is dead and need a replacement or is there anything I can do to bring it back to life? It was hardly use as I had an external drive which I used mostly. Any advise will highly appreciated. Thanks