Vanishing CDROM

[Vyle]

Got a Duron 700, Epox 8KTA+ 192MB Win 98FE machine recently built. It's been running fine but recently every so often, I lose my CDROM in Windows. I have a 32X CD and an HP CDWriter. Every so often the CDROM is gone. I look in device manager and only the HP is there. I shut the computer off and turn it back on and the drive is back. This happens even though the drive is hardware detected when I first power up. What gives? Seen anything like it?

 

[gradivus]

This might sound dumb, but try checking the connectors. I had the same exact symptoms a few months back, only with a SCSI PlexWriter. It turned out to be a bent pin that would foul up the whole bus, making the SCSI BIOS boot horribly slow while only detecting the CD-R about 30% of the time.
Bent it back with a pair of pliers, no more problems.