[holymoly]

Windows explorer, I no longer see a CD/DVD drive recognized.

What's happened?

[Saga Lout]

Have a look in Control Panel>System>Hardware>Device Manager under DVD/CD ROM Drives to see if there's a yellow exclamation or question mark beside it and if there is, click for Properties and Update Driver. If there's no mark at all beside it, go back to Control Panel>Administrative Tools>Computer Management>Disk management. Does the drive show up in there? If there's no sign of it anywhere, restart the computer and tap whichever key it tells you to go into Setup or BIOS - usually Delete or Function 2. Make sure the drive is there as Secondary Master or Slave and post back if it isn't.

[holymoly]

In Device Manager it is there and the Bios does display it a Secondary Master.

I try to update the driver, but it cannot read the windows setup disk, and I am not prompted to do an internet search.

What next?

In properties, "Windows successfully loaded the device driver for this hardware but cannot find the hardware device. (Code 41)

perhaps the hardware is not installed properly. will check.
Update:
found an unconnected plug, but cannot secure it in.

[Saga Lout]

Originally Posted by holymoly

Update:
found an unconnected plug, but cannot secure it in.

The drive should have a power cable which only fits in one way - yellow wire nearest the edge of the drive - and a ribbon cable which is also designed only to go in one way up. If instead of those you have two red or orange SATA plugs, they will also only fit one way so don't force anything. Diesregard that loose wire if the drive already has two.

[holymoly]

I noticed a loose red, black, red plug near the drive that doesn't seem to go anywhere.

But I did notice two plugs into the chip board that one plug, red,white and black wires that should fit into a four pin spot, but its too tight to fit in there (it is right against the other plug).