CD-ROM drive not showing up

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I have a Windows 2000 desktop computer, it's a Dell and i've had it for four years with no problem.

Now, recently and suddenly, my CD-ROM drive (its actually a DVD-ROM drive) has stopped responding. The green light on it does not go on unless I open it, and it goes off immediately upon my closing it.

In "My Computer", I do not see a "CD Rom Drive" option, even when there's a disc in and it does not appear in my Device Manager.

What happened? I actually can't open my machine because 1. It's late, 2. I don't have the tools and 3. Everything else is workings.

It's just horribly inconvenient.

An error message comes up in DOS when I start up windows, but is rectified whenever I press F1. But, recently my sister and her boyfriend have been appearing at the apartment me and my girlfriend share and they both use my computer for MySpace and other websites that leave tracking cookies on my system. What if when i'm at school, they turn on my computer, don't know what to do, press the wrong thing and ruin my computer? I need to know how to fix this.

Open the computer, check for bad cables and unbend a paper clip to manually eject the drive. There should be a hole in the drive to insert the paper clip. The drive may simply be faulty.

One very curious oddity I once came across was a Windows system where the user had disabled both their hard drive and CD drive.

I forget the exact place this was - it was a single page, somewhere in amongst the control panel stuff, but not the hardware manager.

Naturally, the system booted up and used the hard drive (so "disabling" that had no effect), but the absence of the CD drive was total - as if it didn't exist at all.

Have you tried just putting a bootable CD in the drive - just to check if it works at all? E.g. your Windows install disc, UBCD or get hold of a Linux live CD and try that.