my Pc is not detecting the CD rom, though it is connected properly with the Data cable and power cable. The CD drive opens and closes if i press the eject button, but is not visible when i open the my computer. ash

Is it detected on boot? Oh right it's a dell. Ok restart the computer and press esc, del, f2 or f12 or something like that. This is called the BIOS basic input output system. It controlls the computer before it hands it off to windows. Look in there for anything that says silent boot or dell slash page and turn it to off. You may be able to do this from a key stroke after rebooting as well. Anyway, without the dell logo popping up you can tell if your computer (bios) recognizes the drive before the hand off. It should say something like... Detecting IDE drives... Primary Master Maxtor ATA blahblahblah Secondary Master something here if you have two hard drives. Primary Slave Your CDROM brand name and model. Secondary Slave something here if you have two cdroms/dvdroms etc... You may also be able to find this in the bios pages you were in perviously, but I don't think it will be as reliable as the dell bios is quite different from others. If you just installed a new cdrom you may have the cable backwards or in the wrong places on the cable. Or there may be jumpers you need to set on the drives to make them be seen by the bios properly. Dell should walk you through this at no charge, especially if you bought a new drive from them. The Dell splash screen is the one you want to get rid of. It hides lots of info from you when you reboot. You may have seen the numbers spin up on other computers when you reboot them in the past. This is what you want to see. Or you drive could have failed. If so type in the model and brand followed by dell into google and see how many times this has happened to the same dell supplied drives.

Thankyou very much for the suggestions. But when i accessed through the BIOS setup, i cudnt find any silent boot option, but it says " CD Drive (not installed)" when i entered the Primary drive or Somewhere else. Can u please let me know why it suddenly says that it was not installed and how can i fix this problem as i cant install the driver from a CD and in future how to prevent this problem.Can u also tell me where Can i download the drivers for my CD drive. Thanking you once again. ash

"Is it detected on boot? Oh right it's a dell." there is nothing wrong with Dells. is the ribbon cable securely connected to the motherboard? are the CD-ROM and the hard drive connected to the same ribbon cable (referred to as the channel, primary and secondary), or are they on seperate channels?? keep your PCs running smooth and strong by performing regular maintenance and anti-virus/anti-spyware scans. see my website for recommendations.

Is the drive showing up in the device manager? Right click my computer properties hardware device manager is there a DVD\CD-ROM drives Is your drive listed there? Does it have a yellow ! mark on it? If so what is the error code it gives?

Doh! should have read further "cd drive not installed" Most dells like device to be set on cable select. Is the jumper on the drive set to cable select? Is the drive connected on the same ribbon cable as the hard drive? If not is the drive connect to the end of the cable?

"i cudnt find any silent boot option, but it says " CD Drive (not installed)" when i entered the Primary drive or Somewhere else." Of course if it says "not installed" it will not show up in windows device manager. If this is a laptop, and the cd-rom is removable, remove it, then put it back in. That will re-seat it. If it is a desktop, open up the computer and check the IDE cable.