[tetris556]

I have just gotten a new and very powerful computer for Christmas, but the disk drive doesn't appear on the My Computer menu. I have checked the bios, and it is there, but Windows 7 doesn't seem to find it. I have Windows 7 64 bit and a Gigabyte 870A-UD3 motherboard.

[daz1]

assuming the comp is acrually working/running?

start click my computer organise layout tick menu detail navigation then folder/search options reset defaults on both options if no good go back to that point untick hide drives


if comp not actually working ignore above !!

[TerryNet]

if comp not actually working ignore above !!

[Hughv]

Control Panel/Folder Options/View
Uncheck "Hide empty drives."

[tetris556]

I tried both of these, and they didn't work :/

The computer runs beautifully otherwise.

[TerryNet]

Start - Computer. What does show up? Attaching a screen shot of that Windows Explorer window would be nice.

What, if any, warnings or errors are there in Device Manager? What is listed in Device Manager under Disk drives?

[tetris556]

In MY Computer I see, my USB drives, my 2 Hard Drives, and that's it. There are no warnings in my Device Manager either.

[TerryNet]

In MY Computer I see, my USB drives, my 2 Hard Drives, and that's it.

That's several disk drives. That doesn't match well with "but the disk drive doesn't appear."

[ttifrum]

are you talking about a new hard drive that's not formatted? if you are then you may need to go into disk management and format it. To do this right click on 'Computer' either on your desktop or by clicking Start and right clicking on Computer in the right hand column. In the right click menu is an option to 'manage' click this and then click on Disk Management under 'Storage' this will then list all the drives on your computer, at which point if you new drive is listed it may appear as something like 'not initialized', right click on the drive and it should give you the option to format, then all you need to do is follow the prompts.
hope this helps
Michael

[tetris556]

Sorry, when I say hard drive, I mean what you store data on, when I say disk drive, I mean what I put DVDs and CDs in.

[jrbuergel]

You could check the CD/DVD optical disk drive power and data connections. If you put a CD disk in your drive, then look in the my computer for it showing ? If you see this drive listed in the device manager, then try re-installing the device driver for it.

[tetris556]

The drive is not listed in device manager, or the controllers. The bios read it though, so I can still use my ubuntu live disk.

[davehc]

Open the Control Panel - Admiistrative tools - Computer Management - Disk management. You should see the dvd dive there. If it has not a letter assigned to it, give it the next sequential one (E?), and see if that can sort it out.

[tetris556]

I checked disk management, and I found a Drive without a letter called system reserved, but that wasn't it.

[ttifrum]

if this is what I think it is this is a known problem with windows that goes back to XP. For some reason some of the CD rom filters in the registry get corrupted, which means that the CD/DVD drive doesn't show up in Windows Explorer.
The work round is to edit the registry, if you're feeling brave; if you navigate to this setting and delete the Upper Filter setting and the Lower Filter, if it's there, and reboot you should get your optical drive back

Registry Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class
Key Name: {4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}
Value Data: [Delete All Value Data from UpperFilters and LowerFilters]
Note: Do not delete the Key or the Multi-String Values. Delete only the data values.
Exit Registry and Reboot

hope this helps