Hello, I have a Laptop I am working on for my brother, who is in the Navy. When I received it, that hard drive was corrupt, and he had nothing he wanted saved, so I just went ahead and wiped it and reformated. I reinstalled Windows Vista without much of a problem. I just finished all of the available updates, and am troubleshooting other issues (I believe he has a bad stick of RAM).
Anyway, I went to install a bit of software, and couldn't get the DVDRom recognize anything. It has power, and spins the disc, but is unrecognized in the OS. I checked Device Manager, and nothing was there either. I rebooted, and checked the BIOS. The BIOS has no place where it recognizes individual drives, just the ATAPI CDROM in the boot order. So out of curiosity, I tried to throw a Live Linux disk in and set the bios to boot to CDRom first, it didn't boot to the disk, but went into Windows instead. I tried again, and selected the option to choose which device to boot to, and the DVDRom isn't listed. I know that it worked, because I was able to install Windows. I also tried another DVDRom out of another, working Compaq, and had the same results. I have been going at this for a little while now, and am taking a break, and figured I would pose the question here, to see if there is something I may be overlooking.
Anyway, I went to install a bit of software, and couldn't get the DVDRom recognize anything. It has power, and spins the disc, but is unrecognized in the OS. I checked Device Manager, and nothing was there either. I rebooted, and checked the BIOS. The BIOS has no place where it recognizes individual drives, just the ATAPI CDROM in the boot order. So out of curiosity, I tried to throw a Live Linux disk in and set the bios to boot to CDRom first, it didn't boot to the disk, but went into Windows instead. I tried again, and selected the option to choose which device to boot to, and the DVDRom isn't listed. I know that it worked, because I was able to install Windows. I also tried another DVDRom out of another, working Compaq, and had the same results. I have been going at this for a little while now, and am taking a break, and figured I would pose the question here, to see if there is something I may be overlooking.
