If there are any tech savvy people on this site who actually use Windows (and not Macs), I've got a technical question for you.

OK, first off, I have a laptop running Vista. For 6 months I was getting along just fine. I had been converting all my CDs to MP3 files on my hard drive. I have a 120MB Zune I synch my music files to. I use my Zune software to rip the CDs right to the Zune directory in 128mps MP3 format. Basically, I have this configured to open the Zune software and rip the contents of the disc on inserting the disc.

Then all of a sudden one day when I was half way through my collection, I could not get the Zune software to come up when I put the disc in. I was able to start the Zune software and use it, but even from inside the program I couldn’t get it to recognize that there was a disc in the drive. I then tried switching my default settings so that when I inserted a disc, it was supposed to do something else (for example, open up Windows Media player). Nope, didn’t work. I tried inserting a different type of disc which was not set to automatically rip, but play in something else…nothing. So, I went to Windows Explorer to see if I could open the disc directly by drilling down to it, and lo and behold, the D: drive (my CD/DVD-ROM drive) just plain isn’t even LISTED. I went to the hardware and found the device, I checked the settings and the driver and it said the driver was installed correctly, the hardware was installed correctly and the device was working properly. But yet, it’s nowhere to be found using any of the software I can use to access the drive, or even Explorer itself. I tried to reinstall the driver and that didn’t work, so I looked for an updated driver and it told me that Windows is already using the most current driver. I can’t find any information on line about a problem like this, so I’m at a loss.

Has anyone encountered something like this? Did I maybe burn out the disc drive and need another by ripping 1,000 CDs with it? Is there a bug or a fix or something I’m not aware of. Is there a way to force windows to see that there really is something there (not just in hardware settings). Any suggestions at all, I will gratefully try them.