Drives disappeared!!

[Cetti]

This evening my computer displayed a message "There is no CD ROM player attached to this computer. CD player cannot start" The D and E drives have also gone from MY COMPUTER leaving just the A drive for floppies. What on earth has happened, as I can't access Nero Express or save to CD? I would be grateful for all or any help as I'm totally baffled. Thank you.

[Closer]

I have seen this before when a laptop battery has run out during a system restore and aparrently there is a microsoft KB on the subject as it is a known problem....maybe this will help you

[j2buttonsw]

Find the device manager and see if there any problems with the CD ROMs there. If that looks OK (there are no CD ROM drives detected) then check the BIOS when the machine starts up (it should detect the CD ROMs and hard drives before the OS is loaded). If it is not detected in the BIOS then check the cabling: the IDE cable may have become disconnected.

[Cetti]

Thank you both for your replies - and at 2am this morning everything returned. buttons - I was mystified when I went to the Device Manager as my CD-R drive had a red cross, and further down at IDE there was a yellow exclamation mark, so I think you may have hit on the answer as usual. My son was downloading digital pics for over an hour and there were cables everywhere - could this be it?