Pavillion 7920 BIOS bug causes CD drives to disappear?

I bought my son and daughter Pavillion 7920s last year, with both
CD-ROM and RW drives, running Windows ME. They worked great for the
first year, then, once out of warranty, both developed a very odd
behavior: the CD drives disappear. On my daughter's 7920, they
disappeared completely, and stayed missing. On my son's 7920, they
disappeared about two weeks later, and sometimes appear when it boots
up, and sometimes not.

This is not at the OS level; both drives are missing in the BIOS as
well.

Loose cables or connectors? Tried that--no difference.

Defective controller or drives? Not likely, since they both developed
the same problem within weeks of each other.

Virus? My daughter's computer was away at college with her--it seems
unlikely that both would get infected with the same infection at the
same time. Furthermore, I'm not aware of any virus that would alter
the BIOS. (It can be done, but this doesn't seem likely.)

I've tried to get help from HP, but they really don't care what
happens to their customers. Even when I pointed out to their first
level barrier to technical support that this is probably a BIOS
deficiency, they really don't care. (They've sold the computers
already. Why should they care if dozens or even hundreds of their
customers have problems? HP isn't very interested in that sort of
thing.)

Wrong OS? I know that you can't upgrade to Windows XP and still have
the CD drives work, but I haven't done that--same Windows ME that came
with the 7920s--and that worked great for a bit more than a year.

Does anyone have suggestions?

"Clayton E. Cramer" <> wrote in message
news: om...
> I bought my son and daughter Pavillion 7920s last year, with both
> CD-ROM and RW drives, running Windows ME. They worked great for the
> first year, then, once out of warranty, both developed a very odd
> behavior: the CD drives disappear. On my daughter's 7920, they
> disappeared completely, and stayed missing. On my son's 7920, they
> disappeared about two weeks later, and sometimes appear when it boots
> up, and sometimes not.
>
> This is not at the OS level; both drives are missing in the BIOS as
> well.
>
> Loose cables or connectors? Tried that--no difference.
>
> Defective controller or drives? Not likely, since they both developed
> the same problem within weeks of each other.
>
> Virus? My daughter's computer was away at college with her--it seems
> unlikely that both would get infected with the same infection at the
> same time. Furthermore, I'm not aware of any virus that would alter
> the BIOS. (It can be done, but this doesn't seem likely.)
>
> I've tried to get help from HP, but they really don't care what
> happens to their customers. Even when I pointed out to their first
> level barrier to technical support that this is probably a BIOS
> deficiency, they really don't care. (They've sold the computers
> already. Why should they care if dozens or even hundreds of their
> customers have problems? HP isn't very interested in that sort of
> thing.)
>
> Wrong OS? I know that you can't upgrade to Windows XP and still have
> the CD drives work, but I haven't done that--same Windows ME that came
> with the 7920s--and that worked great for a bit more than a year.
>
> Does anyone have suggestions?


Have you tried replacing the CMOS battery?

Have you checked to see that the 2nd IDE controller is enabled in the BIOS
(CMOS settings)?

The is nothing OS specific about the drives. ME or XP or Linux should all
see them. DLA software for R/W disks is different and may be OS dependent.


Check device manager and see if the IDE ports are OK. If a port has gone
bad, you might try a add-in controller card.

Let us know what you find out.

craig

I have a 7920 and I haven't run into that problem on this computer but it
happened on a 6635 when we did a Windows critical update. The Microsoft
boards were full of people asking for help. I think what we did was scanreg
/restore
and set the register back a couple of days. That was over a year ago.
Have the kids actually scanned for viruses? That would always be my first
suspicion.

But of course with Me on the 7920 you don't need scanreg /restore when
System Restore is available. The best time to have used it was the day the
drives disappeared.