Phantom DVD Drive: iTune 9 or not on Windows 7

Alas... the computer was not detecting the DVD/CD drive... or... my DVD/CD drive disappeared!

Or, more accurately, it did find the drive but there seemed to be some problem with the driver because it gave me an exclamation mark next to the device in the device manager...

I tried to uninstall the device through the device manager and restart the computer... It didn't work....

I tried to update the driver but the driver was apparently up to date.

I uninstalled Roxio DE... Didn't help...

Since I am getting errors associated with "PBDS DVD+-RW DH-16W1S ATA Device" and the device status I tried to download the driver directly from Dell website. Unfortunately, when trying to install the driver program, I got this error message saying that the device can not be detected.

At certain point, I wondered... could it be that there is some problem with the drive?

So... I tried to boot into Linux on a CD... and I successfully boot into the CD... which tells me that the drive is working and the problem is OS related.

Since I still have Windows XP on this machine, I booted into Windows XP instead and had no problem accessing the DVD/CD drive.

After hours of researching online and try to find a reason why and after 10-20 minutes of wait time trying to get to a tech support guy at Dell, I thought of the thing about how iTune 8 was causing problem for people to use their CD/DVD drive....

I decided to uninstall iTune 9 while waiting to speak with the 3rd tech support guy that I was transferred to...

Then, when I finally got the guy on the phone, I clicked on "My Computer"....

Voila! There appears my DVD/CD drive and it works! 8-O lol

So... as I was tempted to say it was iTune 9 that was causing the problem, I decided to reinstall iTune 9 again to see whether I could replicate the problem...

Unfortunately, after having iTune 9 reinstalled, have the machine restarted and checked for updates, the DVD drive remain functional.... Well, what the last test tells me is that... something happened after I uninstalled iTune 9; yet, I still have no real answer to the core of the problem....

The only thing I could say... if you encounter the problem of your DVD/CD drive disappearing from your Window 7 system and it remained invisible to your computer after you tried to update the driver or reinstall the device, uninstall iTune to see whether it might help to bring your phantom DVD/CD drive back to life.

What's next? Waiting for it to disappear again since... so I was told... this is what happens to the others before since Vista.... and apparently, the problem is still not fixed up to Windows 7 (and, yes... dear DVD/CD Drive... I am waiting for you to turn phantom again.... 8-O lol 8-X)