I haven't disappeared, an I have been watching all posts.

Here are some of the details:

1. I was trying to rip a cd and it was obviously a bad cd and wouldn't
rip.
2. the computer froze and I had to physically shut it off and reboot.
3. When I booted up, I tried to rip another cd, and when I put the cd
in nothing happened.
4. I decided to go right to the cd to "explore" by going to My
Computer and discovered that the drive e and drive f were not showing up.
5. I went to device manager and didn't see them listed there either.
6. I gave the problem disc to a co-worker who put it in his Linux
driven lap top and it didn't play AND HIS DVD DRIVE DISAPPEARED as
well. But it returned when he re-booted.

I have pictures on this the photo site in the folder called csawtt
computer that will show some of the problems I've described.

bob


======================================

The original poster of this question - Bob (who seems to have
disappeared) -
had a different situation which is why I didn't offer this as a
solution. As
Michael pointed out in his excellent post this morning, Bob had two drives
missing simultaneously and the description of the problem was limited
to one
sentence. You can't really diagnose anything based on - "Suddenly they
aren't showing up in "My Computer" Dell desktop". Maybe he was
upgrading his
own computer and he put the jumpers in the wrong way in the two IDE
drives -
if they were IDE - who knows? Without more information it could really be
any number of things.

Alan