System not recognising DVD/CD rom drive

[Artso]

Hello guys I need your help with this one. I have a Toshiba Satellite A215-S4747 notebook which came with an in-built DVD/CD writing drive that was working fine until recently. For some reason as yet unknown to me the system no longer recognises the existence of the drive (even from BIOS setup). I browsed this and other forums on the net in search of a solution and all I got was a suggestion to "remove certain specific lower & upper-level registry entries/lines using regedit". This I tried to no avail, I am now convinced my problem starts way before we get to the Registy/OS loading stage, why? - because I have also tried to select the "boot from DVD/CD-rom" option during start-up and that option too is no longer available yet it used to be there. Besides I have a dual boot setup on the notebook (XP and Win 7) and both systems are not picking the drive.
I then removed the drive and tried it on another similar Toshiba notebook and it worked fine. Then I tried the drive from the other machine on mine, it too could not be recognised, so I guess it cant be the drive at fault. By the way this problem just started suddenly, no prior warning or intermitent failure or anything. Sadly the machine is out of warranty so I cant take it back to the vendor. I am stuck and I need my burner badly, any solutions or suggestions out there? Is it a hardware or software issue?

[Shinma]

... no longer recognises the existence of the drive (even from BIOS setup)... removed the drive and tried it on another similar Toshiba notebook and it worked fine...

From described situation, suspect hardware issue with connection to the mobo.

[DanceMan]

This problem seems familiar. I'm sure we've had others in the past with this problem on a notebook.

I agree with Shinma; the fact that the cd/dvd is missing from boot options indicates to me that the bios did not detect the drive at boot. Some optical drives use an adapter between the raw drive and the particular notebook. If this is the case in yours, the poor connection could be either there or the connection to the motherboard. Gives you one more place to look. If there isn't anything you can tweak physically, an outboard usb cd/dvd is the only option.