CD drive does not respond

I am running Windows 8 on a laptop. Until recently, everything worked. Now, my CD drive does not read the disk or respond to an eject, but it shows up in Device manager. When I tried to look at from a command prompt it says it cannot find the drive. Due to my fiddling around, there is now another drive letter, I, assigned to a removable drive. When I try to look at this it says that the device is not ready

I found a suggestion for an older Windows problem that said to uninstall the drive in Device Manager, and also to uninstall the IDE controller, then reboot. In my system, I have only a SATA controller, which I assume controls both the CD/DVD drive and the hard drive. Is it safe to uninstall the SATA controller and reboot, to see if this cures the problem? I am concerned because if the SATA does not reinstall automatically, I think I will have no operating system.

I would also like to get rid of the new drive letter and let the CD be drive d:, as it was before.

Thank you,
Jan

SATA is a part of IDE standard so you do not have to actually be there. You're quite safe to uninstall CD drive in Device manager, IDE/SATA controller is obviously working as your HDD works, no need to reinstall that one.