Missing Optical Drive?

[GamerMax5]

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.