Is my CD drive completely broken?

[Pryse]

Hello Everyone,

I just have a quick question regarding a problematic CD drive...

My CD drive will not read/acknowledge any form of disc. There is power going to the drive (lights and tray mechanism both work) but when I insert a CD, DVD etc into the drive it makes a noise (as if its attempting to read) then does nothing.

When I have looked at the drive in Explorer the following message appears:

Exploring - My Computer
D:\ is not accessible
The device is not ready
Retry / Cancel

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I assume something 'fatal' has happened inside the drive and that the whole unit will need replacing.

Is the CD drive completely knackered or is there anything else I can do to diagnose the problem and remedy it?

Many thanks in advance for any comments or help.

Pryse

[EzyStvy]

Try blowing the dust out of the drive.
Try removing it from device manager and reboot.

[Dan Penny]

If your machine has a floppy drive, boot with a Win98SE Boot Disk*. Boot with CDROM support. Place a factory (not burnt) data (not music) CD into your drive. At the A:\> prompt, type in dir x: where x: is your CDROM device letter. If the CD is read and you get a directory listing, the problem is not hardware but software (O/S) related.

*The above bootdisk image file is a self extracting file and has to be executed (run) from a running Windows(9x) machine in order to create the actual startup diskette on one of your floppy disks. (This image file produces the same bootdisk which 98SE creates.) This downloaded image file will format the floppy disk to ensure its integrity, write the files to the disk, then verify the file write, so it'll take a minute or three to create the bootdisk.

Ensure the floppy drive is set as the first boot device in the bios. http://www.d-a-l.com/articles/library/23.html

NOTE: When you boot a machine with this boot floppy, it creates a RAMDRIVE in system memory to contain DOS system tools/drivers. Thus it will move your "normal" CDROM device/drive letter "up" one level. (If your CDROM is normally E: it will be F: when booting with this bootdisk.)

The path to the found CDROM will be set with the bootfiles, so entering A:\>f:\setup is the same as entering A:\>setup at the A:\> prompt. There is no need to include the cdrom drive letter. The CDROM device letter will be assigned near the end of the floppy boot process, right after MSCDEX is loaded.