CD/DVD Gone on Strike

[Passeur]

Hallo : I have a new Compaq Presario XP. Out of the blue, the DVD/CD slot has decided to go out and "do its own thing". Sometimes, like today it refuses to open when the Eject button is pressed.
Other times it opens, I insert a CD or DVD and it opens itself up and wont read the disks at all.
When I first got it, I installed a couple of programs from CD-Roms but haven't done anything destructive like messing round with the registry etc. Does anyone have an idea of what on earth could be wrong? I should phone the suppliers I suppose but we are English speaking, living in France and getting down to technical details in another language is very daunting. Thanks for ANY suggestions !

[MJaeson]

Did you change/alter anything on hardware?

I usually change IDE cables when this hapens and it works.

Mind your warranty options though...

[albertvv]

Isn't it anoying how 100s of things ca go wrong in these windows systems without anybody ever knowing why. Sorry to butt in again with one of my own problems: why can't I configure my disk as master and cd as slave on the drive ctrl. Disk as master works fine, adding cd as slave only finds cd. Moving jumpers to cd as master, disk as slave, no problems. WHY? Same on the other bus with dvd & 2nd disk.
And yes, I've had it too, more than once: press eject, nothing happens.... I always shout: who's the boss here, but that doesn't help either.

[animesh]

hmm yeah i also hav dis slave n master problem, if i configure the cd as slave, and try n make the disc master, it doesnt detect either. stupid windows xp!!