CD-ROM Drive Not Reading...

[Squirter]

My Cd-rom drive is not reading any CDs anymore. I'm not sure what's wrong, it doesn't recognize that a CD is there. Anyone have any ideas?

[Mazer]

Make sure the IDE cable is in securely? Other than that, I wouldn't really know.
Is this an old optical drive? Could be that there's dust inside, or something.
I used to have a really crappy CDROM drive that would rarely read CDs. Often times we'd have to restart the computer several times before it managed to read. After a while we came to be able to recognize whether the CD would read by the pattern of blinking on the drive's LED and the sounds it produced while the computer was booting (One of the reasons I began to dislike trying to play Final Fantasy).

[brenn]

As Coutsos said earlier, make sure the IDE cable is secure. (Same with the power supply one, too.) It could be that it's become defective, that happens sometimes.

If you have another optical drive, you could try to plug the IDE and power cables from your CD-Rom drive into it and see it if that works--if it doesn't you know that it's not the CD-Rom that's broken.

The problem could be anything really, can't help you much without anymore specific information ^^;;;

[Squirter]

I've found that if I keep opening/closing (to make it read the CD again), it will eventually read the CD, maybe after about 20+ tries. :S

[Mazer]

Sounds kinda like what I said. (I didn't mention that part specifically, but yeah...)
So is it an old drive after all?

[Squirter]

Coutsos wrote:

Sounds kinda like what I said. (I didn't mention that part specifically, but yeah...)
So is it an old drive after all?

Maybe a bit less than 3 years, I don't know if that's considered old or not.

[Mazer]

OK, I wouldn't consider that old. The drive I'm talking about was "fast" back when windows 95 was the shit.

EDIT: I guess the warranty is out by now then. Is it just a plain CDROM? Do you not have any other drives (ie, any CD burner?) If so, I'd say this is a pretty good excuse to upgrade . If you're lucky you can sometimes find a decent CD-RW in the $20-30 range, unless you'd like to go for DVD burning capabilities as well (I found a nice one on tigerdirect.ca for $41.97 (after a rebate) but I think they've sold them all by now).

[Martin]

Windows 95 was never the shit.

I unfortunately came into this world of computers when Windows 98 was just born.

[Mazer]

It was when you could go straight from Street Rod II, to Need For Speed.

[brenn]

It also depends if your machine as a whole is still under warranty (or if you're still willing to pay for repairs, not sure what your computer is and how you want to go about getting your CD-ROM fixed) but I've replaced plenty of out-of-warranty parts at work.

[md]

martin wrote:

Windows 95 was never the shit.

I unfortunately came into this world of computers when Windows 98 was just born.

Windows 3.1 for work groups was the shit... everythign since then has just been more bloat

[Squirter]

Okay, this is really weird. For the last 2 days, the cd drive worked perfectly. It was reading every CD I put in like normal. Now it has STOPPED WORKING AGAIN. WHY!?

[brenn]

Intermittently not working is um, probably considered defective. It's probably just old, and broken itself.

Why don't you just replace it? ^^; DVD-RW/CD-RW combo ODDs are quite affordable now.

[the_short1]

ok.. i kinda have this problem b4 too. .

take out CD
close tray
open my computer.. right click and 'refresh'
open tray and insert cd
close tray
go into my computer and right click and press 'refresh'

on my NEW msi cd-rw drive . . it doesn;t recognize new cds (after i burn one) unless i do that.. maybe that will help you.. i dunno

also .. that same drive after 1 week.. i was able to burn cds fine.. but it would NOT read a cd no mater what.. i tossed away 5 cds thinkin they burnt screwd.,. then i poped in a retail cd and noticed it was burner.. so i excahnged burner for a new one. and msi drive works awsome now .. but that was fnny..