Wierd cd problem

I hope someone can help me... I'm out of ideas here. I have a Mats h i ta (don't ask, I'm being edited for bad language if I type it the other way) sr-8582 dvd rom installed on my system. It worked fine until the other day when I got a "please insert a disk in drive" popup. Problem is, I HAD a cd in the drive. When I checked it in MY COMPUTER, the cdrom is there, but I get nothing if I try explore, but the eject option worked, so I assume the power is ok. When I checked device manager though, the cd wasn't listed at all! Now today, after having my computer off for a while, it was back in device manager, but I can't even eject the disk. (Although, if I manually push the eject button, the light comes on (sometimes), but it doesn't eject.) Windows also can't detect it at all! I tried new drivers, but they didn't help, and panasonic has absolutly NO support for this drive on their site at all. Any ideas?

My system configuration.
Dell Optiplex gx1p running windows me
drives:
a: floppy
c: hard drive 1 (master1), first partition
d: hard drive 2 (slave1)
e: hard drive 1 second partition
f: zip drive (slave2)
g: cdrom (master2)

floppy drive has it's own ribbon, hd 1 and hd 2 share ribbon, and zip and cdrom are share a ribbon.

Welcome to Windrivers dragon2125

First rule of troubleshooting a cd drive - unhook the zip drive!

Seriously zip drives account for more oddities than I care to remember, so first thing I would do is uninstall the zip drive and its software, shut down, remove ide cable from the zip drive. Now go to bios and force ESCD update or Update NVRAM (both force bios to re evaluate the devices hooked up) and then reboot.

Does the cd drive appear?
Do you have the motherboard drivers loaded?
What does device manager say about the cd drive? and the IDE/Hard drive controllers?

Found the problem... dead drive. Had to take it apart to get my cd back. I put in my old drive, and everything works again. Thanks for the help though.

anytime