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CD Drive in Laptop not reading but shows up

S

sanders4617

Member
Ok. Last night, I was burning a DVD on my laptop. At the end of it, it got to 100% but wouldn't release the DVD or quit the burning process. So I had to manually turn the computer off and turn it back on.

Now, it will not read my CDs/DVDs. It will show the drive and pick up the drive in the BIOS and everywhere, but it won't read my CDs. I can't even boot from them. I will put one in, and it will make a noise like its trying to read it for about 3-5 seconds, then it stops. I tried updating the firmware, but no luck there.

Then I tried reinstalling windows on it without a CD(mounting), and that worked, but I still don't have a working CD drive.

So I am stuck now with my laptop without a working CD drive, and it makes me want to throw it off a cliff.

Has anyone ever heard of this problem? What could it be? BIOS picks it up, and Windows picks it up, but it won't read any disks that I put in there.
 
It seems that your lasers for CD and DVD are both kaput. Other than that, the drive electronics are OK. My sense is =- replace the drive.
 
Crapper. Just so odd how they went out like that. Is there another way to boot from disk without using a cd?? I know their are external cd-drives.. but besides that?
 
Laptop lasers can sometimes be subject to excessive heat, and that shortens life. They can also be defective. This extract is from a Perkin-Elmer bulletin on the subject:

"Laser diodes with very few defects, operated under proper conditions and circuit designs, may last hundreds of thousands of hours. Laser diodes that fail prematurely were either defective to begin with, had inadequate driver circuitry, or experienced some 'event' resulting in momentary (greater than a few microseconds) excess current, such as exceeding maximum duty cycle or drive current. High temperature operation can also reduce life expectancy."

Yes, there are external optical drives, and some can be booted from. You can also create bootable USB flash memory drives. The best solution is to replace the laptop's optical drive.
 
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