I'm listening to a cd with WMP 9.0 and I pause it, I step away from my computer for about ten minutes.
I come back, and press play (on my keyboard) all of a sudden wmp says that the files cannot be found(the error like when you delete somthing from the computer but not from the playlist)!

I go to eject the cd, nothing happens, no drive light comes on, nothing.
In "my computer", the drive no longer appears (it should be labeled drive "E:" now I just have "A:" "C:" "D:" "F:")

I then shut the computer down and "force-eject" (put the paperclip in the hole) the drive, to take the disk out and see if that was messing it up.

I boot the computer up again and there is STILL no drive E: in "my computer"

oh, recently (four days ago) I moved the computer from on top of my desk to on the floor, although up until today is was working properly

and, the keyboard that I pressed the button on is also new, two days, could that of caused a problem?Travel to Control Panel/System /Hardware/Device Manager and find the CDRom listing...right click it and select uninstall/remove...reboot and see if this cures it.i dont even see a cd-rom drive in device manager, as far as I can tell, the computer does not think that I have a cdromIf it's not listed where i said i have no idea how you were able to listen to music...this could absolutely wrong, but humor me

could it be that when the cd was paused the cd-rom broke and then somehow removed itself from the device manager listing?

and anyway, if it is not listed, and it does not work, does that mean that its probably bit the dust?Well i've never seen this personally but anything is possible...hook it up in another machine to find out.

How old is the device ? ?

New DVD burners are down to about 40 bucks.its about 1 month past the 1 year warranty  In order to determine what was wrong, I took a step back, it might not be windows, it might be te drive

I went into the bios boot order with the INTENTION of putting the optical drive first so i could boot a linux distro from it

When I was changing the boot order, it said that I have no optical drive, still, I persued trying to boot into linux

needless to say, it did not boot into linux

therefore, I conclude: (1)the drive is defective or (2)something got knocked loose somehow inside the case

chances are, that the drive is defective though
If it's not seen in the BIOS and nothing has been down physically to it's connections, I would suggest it's time for a new drive.just because I'm a little compulsive about "unresolved" posts, I THOUGHT I would post the (happy) ending:

I opened the case, just as a last resort and jiggled around the wires connected to the cd drive, now it WORKS flawlessly

I guess it did get nocked out of place when I moved it.

thanks for all the supportThat makes sense as moving can knock things loose sometimes, especially if you move things like I do.