Hai, I'm at the Hayter residence, trying to sort out a DVD drive issue on their Dell. I'll just ramble on about it, and see what you guys make of it. It shows up in BIOS. The tray opens on request. The drive does not show up in My Computer, or Disk Management. Device manager say's the driver is missing or corrupt (Code 39).
I checked cabling. I tried another SATA port. I tried the drive in another machine (it worked). I've uninstalled it from device manager. I've manually uninstalled the hidden driver for it from device manager by adding the environment variables switch. After uninstalling it like this, the driver install fails, and says to contact the manufacturer. I've searched for a driver on the Samsung site, but DVD drives are pretty generic so there was no driver. I've tried Windows Update, no hardware updates. There doesn't seem to be a Dell update utility. The Dell website has only got firmware updates for DVD drives, no drivers for a TSST drive.

This is its name btw:
TSSTcorp CDRWDVD TS-H493A

So uh... what do you guys think, what am I missing?

SATA port settings in BIOS ?

Do they need to be set to IDE compatibility mode for the DVD drive ?

Sounds to me like the drive's firmware is corrupted

You should only need drivers for DVD drives if your running Win98.

Prove or disprove this by taking out that drive and placing it in another computer then seeing what happens.

The Vista OS knows that the drive exists, so I doubt its a BIOS setting. And why would the BIOS randomly change itself and make it stop working anyway. I mentioned in there that I tried the drive in another machine, and that it worked. And I don't think firmware will upgrade unless the driver for it works, so I guess I could update it in a machine whose driver isn't broken. But it works in another machine so I'll leave its firmware as is for now.

hmm - perhaps try rebuilding the driver cache

Chuck Windows 7 on it. That computer needs a reinstall anyway.

Can't access blogspot from work so I'll check that out from home later tonight.