disappearing cd-rom

If the CD/DVD is not showing in Device Manager follow these directions for clearing the Upper/Lower Filters

Click on Start, Run and type in 'regedt32' and press Enter
Expand the "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE" key by clicking the "+" next to it.
Expand the "SYSTEM" Key
Expand the "CurrentControlSet" Key
Expand the "Control" Key
Expand the "Class" Key
Look for a key containing the following string of letter and numbers: {4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}
High light this key by left clicking on it
On the right hand side you are looking for "UpperFilters" and "LowerFilters" under the "Name" column, once you find these Keys delete them by right clicking on them and choosing "delete" exit the registry.
Restart your PC.

If the drive is not present in the Disk Management window or if you are not able to access it, then the drive may have failed. In this window you should see all of your connected physical drives, their format, if they are healthy, and the drive letter.

Change the drive letter of the drive. Right-click on the drive in the list, and from the resulting menu select "Change Drive Letters and Paths"
Click on Change so you can change the drive letter. Click Change.
Select a new drive letter from the drop down list, preferably the one that is not normally used for this drive. EG: U:
Click Yes on the confirmation screen and you are done.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314060

This bulletin contains much of the excellent advice True Blue posted in response to your query. Alas, this Registry edit doesn't always work in situations such as yours.

We road warriors have noted that laptop/notebook OS installations seem inherently less stable than their big daddy desktops. The reasons have been discussed and debated in this Forum, but no consensus has been reached.

My own opinion, for what it's worth, is the relative inefficiency of processor heat dissipation in notebooks compared to desktops. The notebook processor handles the same tasks, but look at the wimpy fan attached!

So you can probably guess where my reasoning is headed: you may need to do a full [i]repair[/i] of Windows to recover CD-ROM access.

Years ago, I adopted a work-around to the instability problem, which I highly recommend as an alternative to [i]repair[/i]: create [i]image[/i] files with Norton Ghost on an external hard drive:

http://tinyurl.com/5s7gw8

It requires only ~6 minutes to create a 10GB [i]image[/i] backup to a firewire/USB-2 external hard drive. You can recover the OS very quickly - Ghost overwrites the native hard drive at 1-2GB/min.

Rather than mess around running various diagnostics, I'll simply run the Ghost recovery, and my notebook will be OK for months.

Hope this helps.

Rick/Portland, OR