The problem is this: I have two laptops, an Inspiron B120 and an Inspiron 2200. The B120 fell off the couch and hit the floor, now it won't charge anymore. Conveniently around the same time, the CD- Rom drive in the 2200 (the laptop I'm on currently) started randomly ejecting CDs and stopped reading them. So I figured I'd just hotswap them, which at first turned out fine. They fit perfectly in each other's bays, but when I booted it up I got this error "The Device in the system modular bay cannot be identified. It may not be completely inserted or may have some other problem. Please read and complete the following steps. 1. Press the device completely and firmly into the bay. 2. Press the ESC-key -- wait for the system to power down. 3. Press the power button to retry detecting the device" After a few days of Googling, I was instructed to do a few things including, Flashing the BIOS, deleting a certain registry key about lower and upper filters, updating and installing the appropriate drivers....I did all of those to no avail. In BIOS, it doesn't even recognize the CD-Rom drive, but after I turn on the computer the lights on the drive blink....it ejects fine and everything... I just have no idea how to make my computer recognize it! I'm about at my wit's end, I hope someone can help.

The Dell site has the best info. I doubt it but it could be some jumper either user or internal to change. Dunno why. Other idea is new one is really too new or dma issue. Might see about enable dma in bios. The driver, reg key and I suspect bios flash was useless and never would have worked. ONLY flash bios if you see issues that exactly say the issue such as allow cd versions. "Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, antivirus, anti-spyware, Live CD's, backups, are in my top 10

'Hotswap' as in doing it when the laptop(s) were powered up? If so that may be the reason it's not working now.

No no, not while they were powered on lol, it seems I misused a term. :p They were both powered off, batteries removed, cords unplugged, etc.

If you put the cdroms back in their original laptops, do their bios recognize them?

Well, I swapped them back and the BIOS does recognize this Cd-rom drive, but it randomly ejects any cd I put in it, sometimes it'll recognize it, and then sometimes it won't. It can't be any malware, I've just reformatted....it's why I swapped the drives in the first place.

Sounds like the one that's not recognized may be bad or incompatible, although you might want to check in cmos/bios setup and see if there's a particular configuration it needs. It seems like since they're both from Dell's and both fit in each others bays then they would be compatible. Post back both the model numbers on the cdroms and maybe we can find out if they're compatible.