Missing Optical Drive?

I'm working on a Compaq Presario F700 notebook. It's having trouble locating the optical drive. I'm running out of ideas but I'm thinking it would almost have to be hardware related. Here's what I've done so far:

1. Attempted a boot from some optical media. The system just continues to default to the next boot device. The media I inserted is functional because it works in another computer.

2. The BIOS doesn't display any detailed information about any hardware in the notebook other than the processor. I can't really tell if the BIOS is actually locating the drive or not. This could very well be the problem here but as I said, I can't verify it.

3. Windows Explorer won't recognize the drive and won't display it under Computer. Device Manager doesn't have any listing for the optical drive and scanning for new hardware on the computer doesn't add anything.

4. Looking at the installed software, there were three or four different media creation software and two different virtual drives installed. I removed all of these to absolutely rule out software conflicts.

5. One of the partitions on the local disk was mounted as drive D. This made me think initially that the optical drive was being mapped to the same letter as the partition. I reassigned the partition to E and restarted the computer. Still nothing.

6. I swapped out the original optical drive with two others that I know are functional. Still nothing.

7. I removed the Upper and Lower filter entries out of the registry.

At this point, I'm completely out of ideas. Any insight would be appreciated. Thanks.

Did you try a load defaults in the bios?

that may be one of the bioses with two different ways to enter it, giving you different abilities. Some compaqs give you general info on a bios entry, and you have to enter a different keypress to get into it and be able to mess with boot options, etc.

That's true...some mb when pressing F11 or shift + F11 open a different menu

Most Compaq/HP laptops require F10 to be pressed to gain access to the BIOS. If the cdrom drive is not listed in the BIOS then either the cdrom is faulty or the M/B is needing to be replaced.

To confirm if the cdrom is faulty, put that drive into another compaq laptop and test it. Not all cdrom drives for laptops work in all laptops. Compaq/HP have a habit of designing cdrom drives that only work in their machines.

Hope this is of use.

Computerman :)

also, the "laptop cd-rom to sata adapter" runs about $4 on ebay. I have one because you just never know when you might need to test one. Actually i have one because i bought one for a htpc i was building and they came in a pair.