Dell Latitude E5400 DVD drive not working after Win7 upgrade

So I've been running Vista Business until today. My dvd drive has worked fine until I finished the Win7 Pro (32 bit) installation, and now my dvd drive is not listed in "my computer" or "device manager" at all. I installed windows 7, so of course it works outside of windows...and I can still boot off other discs and see the drive listed in the bios, but in windows, it's no where to be found. When I press the physical eject button, the drive momentarily appears in device manager, then dissappears again.
The dvd drive is a "PLDS DVD+-RW ds-8a3s. Apparently there is a firmware update for it which I downloaded, but the installation fails, saying no matching drive is found, though the error message says I need the exact model that I actually do have, so it just can't see it.
Anyway, any help would be awesome.

Try this link:

PLDS DVD+-RW DS-8A3S ATA drive

Unforutnately those instructions skip what steps to do if the drive does not show up in device manager, but does show up in the bios.
Thanks though

Sorry,

I tried

Originally Posted by benjaminsmurray

So I've been running Vista Business until today. My dvd drive has worked fine until I finished the Win7 Pro (32 bit) installation, and now my dvd drive is not listed in \"my computer\" or \"device manager\" at all. I installed windows 7, so of course it works outside of windows...and I can still boot off other discs and see the drive listed in the bios, but in windows, it's no where to be found. When I press the physical eject button, the drive momentarily appears in device manager, then dissappears again.
The dvd drive is a \"PLDS DVD+-RW ds-8a3s. Apparently there is a firmware update for it which I downloaded, but the installation fails, saying no matching drive is found, though the error message says I need the exact model that I actually do have, so it just can't see it.
Anyway, any help would be awesome.

You have to update the device firmware.

http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/driverslist.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=gen&catid=-1&dateid=-1&formatid=-1&hidlang=en&hidos=WLH&impid=-1&os=W764&osl=EN&servicetag=JFVRVJ1&SystemID=inspiron1545&TabIndex=&typeid=-1

While you are updating the firmware, you need to keep running a dvd or cd into the device. This allow the system to recognize the device through updating.