I've got a Lite-on DVD-RW SHW-160P6S and for some reason it likes to stop working on me. It spins up when I put a cd in but nothing shows in the explorer and as far as windows is concerned, there is nothing in the drive. Same goes with trying o burn a cd. I can usually fix this temporarily by uninstalling the device and restarting windows. When it boots back up it'll see the device and install it again. After that it'll work for a while. I don't of any changes that would make it stop working. I did update it to the latest firmware but I'm having problems finding any drivers that aren't built into XP SP2.

Just realized I can only use the DVD-RW once after I've uninstalled and restarted. After that, if I take the CD out, windows still shows that the CD is in the drive.

1) check that your IDE cables are securely fastened
2) maybe try a different IDE cable

otherwise

Is this an old drive that used to work well earlier?
Is this a new behavior of the drive or has it always been this way?
Do you have more than one drive on the IDE cable? If so try removing the other device?
What version of windows are you running? (maybe the drive is only supported with XP and you have 2000)

Otherwise I don't really know: some guesses:

known problem with the motherboard (google around)
known problem with the drive (google around)
bad driver (try finding a different driver on the web


But that addendum seems to indicate that the drive isn't reporting to windows that the disk was ejected (loose cable could do this; otherwise the drive is likely dead/broken, go get a new one they're cheap)

-me

I'll check to make sure the cable is plugged in tight. It's a newer drive but I rarely use it so I didn't notice anything until recently.

Make sure you remove any other device on the same cable, for troubleshooting. If the master/slave/cable select is wrong on any drive on the cable, wierd things can happen.

Seems to be working for now. That was the only device on the cable and everything seemed to be connected well. The DVD-RW jumper was set on slave though. I set that to master and made doubly sure that everything was connected well. Thanks!