Missing CD-RW/DVD

[drtom]

A friend purchased an "i series" ThinkPad two years ago. It worked well up until his two daughters go hold of it and discovered the internet so he has asked me to "fix" it. As he doesn't have a Floppy DD I have re-installed the Me O/S from the recovery CDs. ( I have had enough experience in reformatting and doing clean installs of Win98 and, currently Win XP on my own TP770X from a floppy that, using the recovery CD's should be a snap) It took 3 tries but finally everything seemed to reinstall, including the the CD-ROM. Mysteriously without any prompting or use it disappears. In the system tray the red circle/slash appears over the CD icon. When I restart the machine the drive is no longer shown as drive "D". I have gone into C:\IBMTOOLS/DRIVERS/CDROM and clicked on "uninstall.exe". This installed the CD-ROM as drive "D" and it showed in Explorer as such. Upon a restart it disappears again and attempting "uninstall.exe" again gives the warning that IBMTPCD.SYS could not be copied.
Finally, when the machine was purchased it was not only a CD/RW but also a DVD. At the moment I can't see any evidence of this however... it has me baffled.
I'm at a loss here as to why this drive does it's Houdini act. Can anyone enlighten me? All assistance is greatly appreciated.

 

[kestrel1]

Make sure that the CD drive is correctly connected.
I had a laptop that kept losing the CD drive & I found that a screw was missing that held it in place. As soon as I replaced the screw, no more problems.
Even though the drive may appear to be in place, remove it & reseat it. Make sure that the connectors are clean.

 

[drtom]

While it has never been removed before you never know. Thanks, I'll try that.

 

[cdogg]

Take a look at this other thread:
thread615-790640


~cdogg
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