My bios does not detect my cd rom it was working just fine. I hooked a new one up and still bios says unknown device and while booting it says that the secondary drive 0 can not be found. I downloaded the driver from Dell it also says drive not found. I don't know what to do I only have 1 cd rom can't format and start over. Can someone please help, Thanks!

"I hooked a new one up and still bios says unknown device" If the BIOS doesn't detect it, Windows certainly won't. Is this a PATA device? Did you set the jumper correctly? "I downloaded the driver from Dell it also says drive not found" You don't need a driver for an optical device & even if you did, it's useless if the BIOS doesn't recognize the drive.

I believe that it is the pata it is a Samsung sw-245. Yes jumper was already set because it's the original cd rom. I changed it to be the slave and tried it that way Bios still said unknown device. I understand that if the bios doesn't detect then windows won't either. How do I get the Bios to detect it? Is my computer just shot? What would have caused the Bios to stop detecting it to begin with? I want to remove Windows and reinstall it but I can't without the cd rom already bought another but it was a waste of money.