So my laptop is about a year old and aside from having to switch out a bad graphics card about a month ago, it's never had any real problems. This morning, though, I noticed my laptop didn't seem to be booting correctly. It would display the HP logo as always, then show a blinking cursor which just sat there. Normally, my laptop boots in a little under a minute, and that cursor is only onscreen for about 3 seconds. Now, the cursor remains for 2 minutes or so, after which the computer continues booting. Overall boot time is now 3 minutes or more. This last time I restarted it, the screen was totally blank for three minutes, after which the vista logo suddenly popped up followed by my desktop.
The other odd thing is that windows can no longer recognize my DVD/CD drive. It seems the same as always physically, at least as far as I can tell, but windows does not seem to know it's there; it's gone from both My Computer and device manager, and nothing happens when I insert a disc (even though it's set to autoplay.) The drive light still lights up and it still pops out like normal, however. I played a DVD on it just last night with no problems. Earlier that day I had burned a DVD, but that's something I do often and it's never posed any issues; the program I use is ConvertXtoDVD 3. It can't detect the drive either now.
I would assume these problems are connected somehow, since they both started at the same time; but I can't figure out how they're connected. I'm wondering if one caused the other or if they're both symptoms of a bigger problem. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
07-27-2009
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