CD/DVD Drive Not Reading Discs

[joshuarodger]

I am in the process of joining the 21st century and upgrading to wireless internet but am having a problem installing the receiver. When I insert the Installation CD into my cd drive, it does not read it. The light on the front of the drive flashes but nothing pops up on the screen recognizing that a cd has been inserted and when i go to the device manager, the drive is there but it tells me to insert a disc. After this, I inserted DVDs and music CDs also and the same thing happens, which unfortunately is absolutely nothing.

I read through this thread in the software section, but it seems to be a different problem, as their drives are not showing up in the device manager and mine is.

Unfortunately, I've already started the wireless revolution and tossed my old router and modem (which didn't work very well and were the reason i'm upgrading) and now can only access the internet from work. Therefore, I don't have any of my system specs handy at the moment. If they are necessary, I will update when I can. If anyone has any general tips, advice, or outright solutions, I would very much like to hear them.

Thanks in advance,
Josh

[Kevin_gibson]

Originally Posted by joshuarodger

I am in the process of joining the 21st century and upgrading to wireless internet but am having a problem installing the receiver. When I insert the Installation CD into my cd drive, it does not read it. The light on the front of the drive flashes but nothing pops up on the screen recognizing that a cd has been inserted and when i go to the device manager, the drive is there but it tells me to insert a disc. After this, I inserted DVDs and music CDs also and the same thing happens, which unfortunately is absolutely nothing.

I read through this thread in the software section, but it seems to be a different problem, as their drives are not showing up in the device manager and mine is.

Unfortunately, I've already started the wireless revolution and tossed my old router and modem (which didn't work very well and were the reason i'm upgrading) and now can only access the internet from work. Therefore, I don't have any of my system specs handy at the moment. If they are necessary, I will update when I can. If anyone has any general tips, advice, or outright solutions, I would very much like to hear them.

Thanks in advance,
Josh

Hi,
Does your DVD drive appear in My Computer? I know you said it shows in Device Manager. Is there any yellow exclamation marks or error messages?

Have you checked in BIOS to see if your CD is detected? Can you boot off of a CD? I.e. Vista, Norton, XP? Or something similar.

If you can, you could be looking at a software fault, if you can't, you're more likely looking at a hardware fault.

But before you go looking for a new drive, try it in safe mode by pressing F8 during boot up, and see if you get anywhere that way.

1 thing I try on my machine, is go back in to Device Manager, remove the following:

1: Click on DVD/CD-ROMS.
Anything that's in here, right click, and click on uninstall.

Go down to IDE controllers and find IDE Controllers and remove the secondary IDE controller (If here)

When done or prompted, restart.

Give it a few minutes when back in to Windows, it should ask to restart a 2nd time, and once back into Windows again. Try your drive, if that doesn't work, then try as mentioned above with safe mode and the bootable disk.

Hope this helps, or at least, gives you some helpful tips on somethings to try.

Kev