This may be as simple as a drive letter conflict. Try this. Open Disk Management. If you're not familair with Win 7, the way to find disk management is simply to tap the windows key and type "disk management". Make the window full screen so you're sure you can see everything. You'll see your hard drives and partitions and you should be your DVD drive and possibly drive letters for any media card readers. Your DVD drive may be listed as a CD-ROM. Right click that device and select change drive letter and paths, then click the change button. Pick a drive letter higher than the highest letter being used by another device. It might be H, I, J, whatever. Save it then OK out of this and close disk management. Reboot and tell me what you see.
I tried this and assigned drive M: to the 3G dongle and restarted. Still does not show the DVD/CD. The CD-Drive designation remains with the 3G dongle and the drivers used normally for the DVD/CD drive has been assigned to it.
I've also tried your DVD identifier program - also does not even see the DVD/CD drive.
Ok, that's not good. Let's try running the Dell diagnostics on your drive. To test your CD/DVD drive from the utility partition: 1. Reboot your system. When you see the Dell logo, hit F12 to enter the boot menu. 2. Select Boot to utility partition or Diagnostics. 3. Select Test System. 4. Select Custom Test. 5. Use the arrow keys or mouse to select your CD/DVD drive. 6. Insert a CD or DVD. 7. Click Run Tests. 8. Write down any error messages.
osprey4
4 Operator
•
34.2K Posts
0
December 22nd, 2011 10:00
Hi Chris,
This may be as simple as a drive letter conflict. Try this. Open Disk Management. If you're not familair with Win 7, the way to find disk management is simply to tap the windows key and type "disk management". Make the window full screen so you're sure you can see everything. You'll see your hard drives and partitions and you should be your DVD drive and possibly drive letters for any media card readers. Your DVD drive may be listed as a CD-ROM. Right click that device and select change drive letter and paths, then click the change button. Pick a drive letter higher than the highest letter being used by another device. It might be H, I, J, whatever. Save it then OK out of this and close disk management. Reboot and tell me what you see.
chrisbrits
2 Posts
0
December 30th, 2011 13:00
Hi Osprey4,
I tried this and assigned drive M: to the 3G dongle and restarted. Still does not show the DVD/CD. The CD-Drive designation remains with the 3G dongle and the drivers used normally for the DVD/CD drive has been assigned to it.
I've also tried your DVD identifier program - also does not even see the DVD/CD drive.
Any other suggestions?
Regards - Chris
osprey4
4 Operator
•
34.2K Posts
0
December 30th, 2011 14:00
Ok, that's not good. Let's try running the Dell diagnostics on your drive. To test your CD/DVD drive from the utility partition:
1. Reboot your system. When you see the Dell logo, hit F12 to enter the boot menu.
2. Select Boot to utility partition or Diagnostics.
3. Select Test System.
4. Select Custom Test.
5. Use the arrow keys or mouse to select your CD/DVD drive.
6. Insert a CD or DVD.
7. Click Run Tests.
8. Write down any error messages.