westothemax

Recently my CD drive on my laptop (HP Pavilion N5470) has stopped reading disks. BIOS sees the drive, as well as WinXP. I can eject by doing the right-click on drive icon -> eject from Windows. Whenever I try to read anything, music cd, DVD, blank cd-r, or a regular cd, then Windows says "Insert a disk into drive D:".

I'm not sure if this is related, but right before the drive crapped out, I was installing SBC Yahoo! DSL software off the supplied CD. This software messed my system pretty badly... Windows wouldn't boot, so I used GoBack (it came with Norton Systemworks) and reverted my hard drive to before I installed the DSL junk. After that Windows booted up but the CD drive wouldn't read CDs anymore.

The reason why I'm not sure if it's related is because I tried to boot from the WinXP CD, but that didn't work. It's not like the DSL junk could've physically damage my CD drive.... could it?

Well I tried calling HP tech support and they wanted $30 for me to talk to someone... who probably would've told me "Gee never heard of that happening before...". The replacement part is $750.

Anyway, does anyone know anything about troubleshooting this kind of problem? Is there something I missed? Is my best bet trying eBay for a replacement drive?

propaganda

This did actually happen to me but if I opened the disk with Windows Explorer it works but I'm not sure if that might work since this happened to me because the Dell technical support formatted my computer wrong.

Nhanced1

I suggest removing the drive from the device manager, and rebooting, letting the system reinstall the drive, and then trying it again. Ive never had any luck with those cd cleaners or whatever that you can buy. but if you want to, try that. You could reformat your computer with a boot floppy disk, but then your pretty much banking on it being a software problem and not a hardware one.


EDIT: Cool, Im a donor now. Score

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westothemax

I tried opening through Windows explorer but no luck, still.

I'll give the uninstalling the device and letting WinXP reinstall it a shot. I thought about trying to reinstall WinXP maybe over the network but I'm not too sure how that works.

Thanks for the replies.

Pragma

Installing XP over the network is not something you can do (normally) at a home setup. Assuming that your network card supports PXE booting, and you have a Win2k Server running a Remote Install Server, then you can remotely install Windows (XP or 2k (or 2k3)).

Otherwise, you'll need to hope that the drive isn't physically damaged and that you can do something within the software to get it working.

If the machine is still within warranty, and you still can't get it working, call up HP and say "The cdrom drive is damaged, i want a replacement" and either take it out and send it back or else send back the whole laptop.

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The_Dude

go up to the drive manufacturer's site and try downloading and running the latest bios flash.

i had the same problem with my 52x cdrw, and i flashed it and it fixed it.

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yakimushi

No offence... but $750 for a freakin' DVD/CDRW drive???????

Thats nuts!

If your laptop supports standard size optical media drives you can probably find a replacement for much, much cheaper (if one is needed).

Also check to see if you lappy supports booting from external media, such as a USB CDROM. Maybe you could "borrow" one from best buy for long enough to do a quick install.

And last but not least, you could always yank the hard drive and slap an adaptor on it (http://66.216.68.88/details.htm?productid=4A-1097) and drop it into desktop, clear it off, and make it bootable. Hell, you can even start an XP install on it. All you have to do is start the install in windows (Win98 works well for this, fast and easy to install, hell all you need it for is reading the CD), choose full installation instead of upgrade, then under Advanced installation options choose to copy all the files to the hard drive first.

Of course, this only works if your CDROM drive isn't borked.... did you check your ASPI drivers? (If you had them , XP doesn't come with them natively.)

Ok, sorry that was so long!

CaptainFluffer

Heh, mine quit working too. I have a Pavilion N5420 and it just quit. I sent it in to the warranty repair shop and they gave me a new one, but the new one doesnt even work either. I'm sending it back again...