Last week I wrote a post explaining how to create a First Aid USB kit for computers, and boru left a comment on it asking for help about a very specific issue: he wanted to recover the CD-ROM drive icon that had disappeared from ‘My PC’. While this has never happened to me, I was curious to see if there was any solution to this situation and after a short period of googleing, browsing and reading, I came up with three possible ways to retrieve missing CD-ROM drive icons in Windows:
1. Maybe your CD drive is physically disconnected from the system. Don’t worry, you don’t need to open the computer just to check. Right click on the ‘My PC‘ icon and select Properties. Then click on the Hardware tab and press the Device Manager button. Find the CD/DVD ROM drives item in the list and click on the + sign beside it. At least one entry should appear below it. If nothing shows up, it’s time to open the computer and check that the drive is connected.
2. You may need to update the drivers. Visit your computer’s official website and look for any download area in it, or simply use Google. Also, if your computer is still under guarantee, try calling Customer Support.
3. If the guarantee period of your computer has already expired, you can also try Microsoft Support. A quick search on their website gave some results regarding missing CD-ROM drives, or drives that are not recognized by Windows or by specific applications. This one, for example, helps you fix the problem automatically with a step-by-step wizard, and also explains an alternative Registry tweak in case you want to try to fix it by yourself.