My DVD drive is suddenly missing from Windows Vista

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.

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.

Go in Device Manager and uninstall the drive and restart the machine.

When the machine restarts Vista will find and reinstall it.

If its not listed in device manager, you have more of a problem than Vista.

Check your BIOS settings for the recognition of the drive and Cabling connections to the drive itself for any loose connections.

I have come across the same issue recently on an acer 4190. Device manager shows the dvd drive as being present and working correctly.

None of the common fixes seem to work for me: Deleting the Upper/Lower Limits in the registry, updating the driver - vista insists the latest driver is installed, disabling and rebooting - vista recognises drive and installs but i still can't get it to display in my computer.

When I use computer management and try to assign a letter for the dvd drive it will allow me to go so far as to choose the drive letter i wish to use, though before i can click ok it resets back to blank!!! ???

Just to update this thread, a year after the original post, nothing would get the drive working again. I found a certified Toshiba repair center near where my dad lives and brought the drive there. There were a few other people there with their Toshiba's and they told me that this was the second time, third time, fourth time etc. that they've been there with the same problem, various problems etc. Guess I won't ever buy a Toshiba! The guys there didn't really want to help and said they'd have to hold on to the Laptop for a few weeks. We ended up saying "screw it" and I bought an external hard drive and transferred all the photos and videos to that. According to my dad, the drive still doesn't work, even after multiple fresh installs of Vista. He waited for the one-year Toshiba warranty to run out so that he could take it to Circuit City and have them fix it on the additional one-year warranty he purchased. But so much for that. I told him not to buy from a chain and I told him not to buy Toshiba's...