phantom DVD-ROM drive

[Guest]

My main drive, my D: drive is a DVD-ROM drive and it seems to be a ghost.
It's there on My Computer but it reads no discs, doesn't even acknowledge
that I put one in. I can't even right-click on it to get any options, it's
like it's not there, nothing pops up. It is, however, displayed in MY
Computer so I know windows recognizes that it's there. Its not reading discs
is preventing me from being able to reformat my computer. Any suggestions as
to what could be wrong?

 

[RJK]

How old ? ...has it died perhaps ? Bios / IDE port settings correct ?
Power cable to the drive and all IDE ribbons fully seated - and if it's on a
PCI-IDE card, card fully seated ?
Does its' LED blink as a disk spins up ?

regards, Richard