Hello.

I have a Toshiba Satellite U305 that I'm borrowing from my dad. I need to give it back to him in a week and get all my stuff off of it, but the CD/DVD burner has disappeared from within Windows Vista Home Edition.

I'm really not sure how long the drive has been missing as I just noticed it today. I've been travelling with some friends for the last 1.5 months and uploading all our pictures to the computer. When I went to burn some DVDs of these pictures, I noticed that my DVD burner was not listed in My Computer. After further investigation, I discovered that the drive was completely gone. It's missing from Device Manager and doesn't show up under Administrative Tools->Computer Management->Disk Management either. There is no evidence that it exists or ever was there, no exclamation marks next to the device in Device Manager or errors to indicate a device error or driver issue. When I try to discover the device with "Add new hardware", it isn't found.

I'm unsure if this is a problem with Vista, but when I put a CD or DVD in the drive, the drive spins up and the lights go on. I'm still away, not home for another week and I have no boot disc to try and boot from the drive. I'm not familiar with the Toshiba bios. I went into it, but I didn't see any mention of an optical drive, which leads me to think that there might be a hardware problem, but I might not be looking in the right place. I'm used to the evga 680i bios Maybe the drive controller has gone bad, or there's a loose connection. Maybe the drive is malfunctioning. I really have no idea.

Any suggestions are appreciated. I have spent countless hours surfing the internet from a coffee shop trying to find a solution. I want to point out that I have used to different registry fixes that supposedly work for many people. One removes the LowerFilters and UpperFilters values from the registry section. The other removes things like [HLM\SYS\CurrentControlSet\Services\Cdr4_2K] etc. This hasn't worked. I'm ready to delete the IDE controllers from within Device Manager and reboot, but I'm really afraid to lose any information. I have almost 30 Gb of photographs from my camera, my brother's camera and my girlfriend's camera on here from our travels since the beginning of June. It would be disastrous to lose all that!

Thank you in advance for any help and/or suggestions.

Most of the time, this problem is resolved by shutting down into "Sleep" mode. The missing drives reappear when you wake the computer.

However, since you have a Toshiba, I suggest you try the hotfix:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/934641

Yeah, I saw that some people are able to get their drives working again by going into sleep mode and coming back again. However, I always keep my computer in sleep mode and then I wake it up when I want to use it. This hasn't gotten my drive going in my case. I'll check out that hotfix article right now, though.