CD Rom Drive Issue

[xoggoth]

Not almost out of hard disc space are you? They need cache to work.

When I lent the missus my laptop she filled it up with games and nonsense and the CD rom stopped working. As soon as I deleted all her freshwater fish and recovered some space on the hard drive it worked again.

[Kess]

Can the BIOS see it?

I second this. I've exactly the same problem with the CD drive in my laptop; sometimes it is detected by BIOS and works fine, other times it vanishes completely. I suspect a dodgy connection.

[Sysman]

I second this. I've exactly the same problem with the CD drive in my laptop; sometimes it is detected by BIOS and works fine, other times it vanishes completely. I suspect a dodgy connection.

That rings a bell. I had that on my old Mac (an iBook) when it went through a phase of not seeing the CD drive after startup.

One method which worked every time was to stick the installation CD in and boot from that, then do a software restart to boot to the normal system disk. That was time consuming, and I found that leaving in a music CD in there had the desired effect.

I have no idea why and saw nothing in the logs, but it worked.

[RSoles]

Don't wish to hijack this thread, but I have an elderly Dell laptop with a DVD drive which reads DVDs but won't read CDs. Odd.