[skiptomyloo]

From checking the forums before to solve this mystery, I'm guessing zumiel will be the one to respond to this, so I suppose I'll just address it as such...

zumiel,

I am trying to solve a mystery on my buddy's ancient laptop. He claims that after he installed Alcohol 120 trial, his physical optical drive no longer showed up in Windows. I tried uninstalling it, cleaning the registry, etc., but nothing worked. The drive does not appear in the device manager, nor does it even show up in the BIOS! I dissected the machine and made sure all the hardware was connected, but still nothing... I am willing to wipe the partition and start anew, but as of now, I don't even have that option because, although it makes all the right sights and sounds, the drive doesn't even show up. Yikes!

I found some forum posts with similar issues, but I could not find a direct answer. Instead there was a link from you to post a new topic in the technical section, so here I am. Is my only option to try and get an external optical drive and do a complete reinstall? Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance for your time!

This post has been edited by Charalambos: 27 August 2009 - 03:22 PM
Reason for edit: Removing system report

[Charalambos]

Alcohol doesn't affect the BIOS. If the drive is not visible in the BIOS then this means that it is dead. The fact that it happened a little time after the installation of Alcohol is just a coincidence.

[zamiel]

zumiel?

Is power getting to the drive? If you press the eject button, does the tray open? Can you try a different Power Connector or IDE cable?

[skiptomyloo]

zumiel?

Is power getting to the drive? If you press the eject button, does the tray open? Can you try a different Power Connector or IDE cable?

zamiel (sorry!) -

Thanks for the question. Yes, the drive has power, and it behaves like a perfectly functioning optical drive. I can open it and close it, and it spins and at least tries to read just as a normal drive would. It's very strange - it showed up for certain before Alcohol, and definitely not afterward. No other installations or notable events like that occurred. Whadya think?


Charalambos -

I'm not accusing Alcohol of "breaking" the computer, I'm just stating what happened. I understand the urge to limit liability, but I really don't think that mindset is helpful right now. I just want to figure this out. Do you have any suggestions?

[skiptomyloo]

nevermind. i managed a network reinstall.

[zamiel]

Have you tried a different IDE cable? As Charlambos indicated, Alcohol does not modify the bios in anyway, so it's either a cabling or hardware issue.