Need help with CD Drive Issue

Recently I noticed that my CD Drive was no longer appearing in the My Computer Window. I was using a virtual image of a game I own and had installed but that I couldnt find the disk for (I swear, I owned it ) Once I disabled the virtual drive I no longer had a CD drive show up in My Computer even though there is one installed and it is installed correctly. It is set up as the slave to the hard drive which I believe is correct. The jumpers are correct and it shows up in the BIOS but not under windows XP. I would try to update the drivers but I dont know who makes it, only that it is a 16x CD/DVD Drive. This is all happening under windows xp. If someone could help me I would greatly appreciate it. I would like to fix it quickly so if someone could help me out over AIM, my SN is: verymanynames

Also, I figured I would try to uninstall and reinstall the drive. The CD Drive Section is not showing up under device manager at all. I figured maybe I could do it manually so I turned off the computer, Unplugged the drive and restarted. It went to a black screen and I heard a voice saying "System Failed PPU test" over and over.

Thanks a lot.

my best gess is is the drive is DOA . one of the easies ways to tell is to check and make sure that the cables are pluged in in the back of the computer . put a bootable cd in the drive . make the cd the primary boot device . if it does not boot put a different cd in because yours is dead.

Do what Wiz says but if it turns out that your cdrom works: First back up your registry... Then go into your device manager and delete the cdrom drive if it is there. You already said that it wasn't but just check anyway. Then delete the IDE/ATA controller in the device manager. Reboot your computer. Windows will re-detect the controller and then your cdrom. You may have to reassign you drive letter(s) if you changed them from the default.
This is a common problem.

Which controller should I delete? Who ever set this up has a cable going from the Mobo to the hard drive and then the cable branches and goes to the CD Drive. Im assuming I should delete the secondary IDE controller? Or delete all of them?

If there is only one cable going to two drives then I would assume that the primary is being used. In your cmos it should tell you. I would just delete both the secondary & primary. I usually do. I don't think I have ever tried just deleting the primary without deleting the secondary. You may also find a 3rd entry under the drive controller if you have an intel drive controller on the MB. Then delete secondary, then primary, then the 3rd entry if it exists.

just delete both it will pick both of them back up

That was exactly it guys, thanks a lot!