Most reliable way to refresh the installation of an optical drive. Windows 10.

Captain Ron

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I have an old PC which I have had since it arrived with Windows Vista (shudders) and over the years I have upgraded it all the way to Windows 10 professional. It's a bit slow as you can imagine but it still does the basic tasks I ask of it well. Recently however, the SATA connected UHD friendly optical drive periodically decides to vanish from system availability. Tray ejects fine on button press so I know power is going to the drive ok but it's not available in Windows. I checked all the cable connections and all appears well. I am thinking the drive was installed under Vista and the machine has been through several OS upgrades so maybe something has got corrupted or flaky in the installation of the drive. To reinstall, do I just use add/remove hardware and then reboot windows to re-add the drive or is there anything else recommended that I should check first?
 
Delete the driver and reboot, it should reload the driver
 
As the machine is of some age I would suspect a hardware fault either with the optical drive or the motherboard, the cable or even a dry solder joint. Optical drives are plug and play so all you can do is delete it from device manager, reboot and the drive should be re-detected. If the problem persists you could try replacing with another internal optical drive and cable, in a different port but no guarantees.
 

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