CD Rom Drive Issue

[RSoles]

Don't wish to hijack this thread, but I have an elderly Dell laptop with a DVD drive which reads DVDs but won't read CDs. Odd.

[Sysman]

I second this. I've exactly the same problem with the CD drive in my laptop; sometimes it is detected by BIOS and works fine, other times it vanishes completely. I suspect a dodgy connection.

That rings a bell. I had that on my old Mac (an iBook) when it went through a phase of not seeing the CD drive after startup.

One method which worked every time was to stick the installation CD in and boot from that, then do a software restart to boot to the normal system disk. That was time consuming, and I found that leaving in a music CD in there had the desired effect.

I have no idea why and saw nothing in the logs, but it worked.

[Kess]

Can the BIOS see it?

I second this. I've exactly the same problem with the CD drive in my laptop; sometimes it is detected by BIOS and works fine, other times it vanishes completely. I suspect a dodgy connection.

[xoggoth]

Not almost out of hard disc space are you? They need cache to work.

When I lent the missus my laptop she filled it up with games and nonsense and the CD rom stopped working. As soon as I deleted all her freshwater fish and recovered some space on the hard drive it worked again.

[Addanc]

NOTE not necessarily the drive, there is an XP fook-up which prevents access of CD drive. You need to search MS site for repair prog that corrects problem.

[daviejones]

Buy a Mac...

HTH

[TheFaQQer]

Any ideas why and what i could do to resolve this problem.

Buy a decent laptop.

HTH.

[Sysman]

Have you tried a lens cleaner on it?

[dinker]

Can the BIOS see it?

[pmeswani]

Hello forum,

My Toshiba Satallite Pro laptop is unable to read any CD or DVD inserted into its CD Rom drive. Any ideas why and what i could do to resolve this problem.

Many thanks in advance.

Try booting the system with a Live CD and see if that works... that way you can determine if the problem is OS based or Hardware based. If it is hardware based, time to get a new DVD writer / player for your laptop and disable it in the bios.... or get your laptop repaired.

[Moscow Mule]

If it's one of the removable ones, take it out (fully) and reboot.

Stick it back in after rebooting - this will prompt windows to recognise it again (if it's not buggered).

[Clippy]

When you insert a disc, does Windows recognise it?

If not, sounds like your drive may be buggered.

[cojak]

Update and reinstall the driver? (via the interweb, obv...)

[Ilu]

Hello forum,

My Toshiba Satallite Pro laptop is unable to read any CD or DVD inserted into its CD Rom drive. Any ideas why and what i could do to resolve this problem.

Many thanks in advance.