It's happened twice in two days. It comes back after a reboot. When I try to start Oblivion I get the message (unable to find dvd drive on this computer) or something like that.

Is this just a typical drive going bad or could it be something worse? Everything I find on the internet is for a hard fault so I have to turn to the collective experience here a SimHQ. Maybe this is something that happens all the time.
Thanks

Most likely the drive IMO, but be sure your power settings don't allow for sleep mode. Windows doesn't always bring devices back from sleep well.

My DVD drive is always "present" on the list of drives, but it's ability to read discs, especially the old ones, has been spotty at best. It would sometimes detect my Falcon 4.0 CD but I could never install Falcon 4.0 --- while it would detect the CD, I think it couldn't find the "start point" or something like that. I thought my CD has gone bad, but trying it on my gaming laptop, the CD was recognized immediately and when I try to install Falcon 4.0, it would do it straight away. This convinced me to get rid of my DVD drive. I don't burn backups to DVDs like I used to, with large capacity HDDs being very cheap nowadays. Any CD that I need (drivers CD for motherboards), I make a "copy" from the gaming laptop then load the "copy" into a USB stick.

Thanks for the replies. I'll check the power settings. That's the kind of tip I'm looking for.

I've had a lot of flaky cd/dvd reading problems through the years but I've never seen one disappear completely.
Thanks