DVD Writer Not Detected by Laptop

[weallo]

I have a P4 2.6 ghz, 512mb ram laptop running windows 2000 and is out of the warranty period.

A few months back my dvd/cdrw combo drive disappeard.  I bought a brand new nec 3600 dvd writer as I thought the drive could be broken but this new drive is not detected by windows 2000 either.  Nothing appears in My Device Manager.  There are no exclamation marks or device conflicts.  No matter which drive I put in device manager DVD/CD Rom Drives - VOBID InstantDrive CD SCSI CdRom Device is listed.  The drive does get power and opens but Windows does not detect it.

I have been told that the IDE cable could be loose?  What does this mean and my laptop does not look like its been designed to be dismantled!

Anybody have any ideas?  

[merlin_2]

The ide jack plug.....maybe damaged..........have you constantly changed drives.......what is the make of the laptop..does your f/d drive work??have you checked that the drives are enabled in the bios setup?

[weallo]

I have only swapped the drives over once putting the new one in instead of the old but neither are detected.  The laptop is made by Novatech  www.novatech.co.uk which is a fairly large UK company but not worldwide.  The floppy disk drive works no problem reading disks and allowing new stuff to be added etc.  I put the bios to the default settings as I do not really understand what the bios is all about.  I would assume that the default settings would be correct?  The primary and secondary stuff and print master and slave is something I know nothing about.  Any further ideas would be appreciated, Thanks.

[merlin_2]

is the drive fully home with the lock or catch on it....the get out of jail free card would be.....take the cd drive back and exchange it for an external drive..........or contact novatech......does sound like the jack port is either misalined.....or damaged pins....