CD Rom disappeared

[pmanton]

My wife's Dell had the CD-Rom disappear. I checked BIOS and it wasn't there. I shotgunned it and ordered a new CD-Rom drive. I figured that the drive itself must be bad for it to disappear from BIOS.
Installed the new drive--trouble remains. When I opened the case I was the first one in there. All cables looked fine, nothing loose.

I went to Dell and downloaded a new BIOS and re-flashed it.

Trouble remains.

HELP what next??

Thanks

Paul
Salome, AZ.

 

[Bob Noel]

even if the cables "looked fine", try replacing them.

 

[asicer]

Switch to using ISO files? I'm not sure who would need physical CD's any more or why. Perhaps if you could explain, that would help. Also, is this for a laptop or is this for a desktop? Otherwise, perhaps get a USB CD drive?

 

[Spring Ford]

Have you checked Device Manager for errors? Warning triangles beside device.



With most built in devices you can refresh the install by "uninstalling" the device and then "scan for hardware changes". Don;t blame me if you lose the driver forever.

Full reboot? With W10 a "shutdown" and then power on does not do a full OS restart. You need to do a "Restart" - or change the settings and disable "fast startup" forever.

Check OS files for corruption.

Open administrator command window.

sfc /scannow

If it can't fix it

dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth

might. If dism used repeat sfc as above.

 

[Albany Tom]

all the above. Plus, assuming it's a desktop, try a different power connector. Another troubleshooting thing would be to set the bios to enable booting from cd, and see if it tries to with an old version of windows or something. If it tries to, you may have an OS problem. If it doesn't try to, you may have a hardware problem - motherboard, cable, power supply. If it's hardware, you can always run an external usb cd-rom for most things.