I highly doubt that Remove WAT tampered with your BIOS...registry maybe but not the BIOS. Have you tried going back a couple BIOS versions? Perhaps to the v2.6.1 A14 BIOS (this one had a critial AMD errata fix). Also aside from the DVD drive, is all other hardware original to the way you got it from the factory?
Thanks for the reply. No, I have not tried going back a couple of BIOS versions. I will do that and report back. Yes, all of the hardware is all original, except for the new DVD drive, which is from Dell and is compatible with my service tag. Regarding Remove WAT, I could certainly buy into registry corruption...any ideas why a restore of an Acronis image from months ago didn't fix registry corruption? Related, any ideas what registry entries to remove to or modify to fix the problem? Also, I would wonder why both the old and new drives don't show up correctly in the BIOS, which should be well before the Windows Registry comes into play. Nonetheless, I think the old BIOS version has merits and I'll track the old version down and flash and then report back. Thanks!
Okay, here's the latest update: 1) I have flashed the BIOS with previous versions, both before and after the important AMD update. No change in status. Thus, both DVD drives are incorrectly listed in the BIOS. The DVD drive in the machine when I ran Remove WAT will not boot into Win7 at all--the system hangs. The new Dell drive will boot into Win7, but is not listed in Device Manager or in My Computer. So, it seems, as many of you have surmised, the IDE controller is bad. Do I have any options? Also, are there any other fixes I might try? Thanks!
Also, I'm wondering if someone can explain/tell me how the BIOS is grayed out in certain areas, such as DVD drive, how the CMOS/BIOS determines what those devices are or even the labels. Is there a way in some sort of editor to be able to go in and edit those entries? I'm curious at this point.
The BIOS is querying the drives for their ID string. If the BIOS/Windows can't query the drive correctly, your data going across the IDE port would get corrupted too.
I'm not sure how to phrase this clearly, but I was asking something a bit differently...how does Dell dictate to the BIOS that it is looking for a CDRom or DVD drive and how does Dell gray out the option to select a new device/drive. There are no user settings under CDRoms or DVDs...is there a way to use a generic BIOS to have some of those options available? Hope that made more sense. Thanks for all of the time and effort in this matter.
Most Dell BIOS'es are custom-made by/for Dell and are pretty closely tied to the actual hardware. With that said, they pretty much can make it do whatever they want. Ex: probe the primary ATA port for CD/DVD and display the drive ID string as read-only text Sorry, there isn't really a generic BIOS to use. You'll probably brick your laptop if you try something like that.
Thanks for the information! Too bad you can't go in and mess with the actual BIOS--that would be cool, but it is what it is...I guess I'm all out of options at this point besides replacing the motherboard, which doesn't seem that difficult (already had the case opened up and checked it all out). I wanted to say thank you for everyone who took the time to reply and to explain things to me! I really appreciate all of the time and effort! Thanks!
I just read your issues here - and just wondered did you ever end up fixing the problem or did you replace the motherboard? I have the exact same issue!! Not many solutions online at all. I bought a DVD writer on eBay as well and still have the same problem. Thanks and happy easter!