My CD drive will play a music CD, but it won’t read a program disk I want to load. It also won’t read the driver disk, so I can’t reinstall it.
Is there something I can do to avoid dragging this to a repair shop?
Thanks.
What make and model?
It’s likely that the drivers can be downloaded for free from the manufacturer’s website. Assuming it’s a driver issue, of course, which I don’t have enough information to determine. But it couldn’t hurt.
ETA: Wait, do CD drives even come with drivers anymore? All of the ones I’ve installed in the past few years have been automatically configured by Windows upon installation.
ETA #2: If you determine that faulty hardware is the problem, I’d recommend avoiding the repair shop. It’s going to cost well over the cost of a brand new CD/DVD drive to repair such a thing. And swapping them out isn’t too difficult, really.
Samsung SW 252S
I ran Driver Detective and it said everything is fine. But it’s not.
New wrinkle - it’ll read and install commercially produced CDs, but it won’t read a couple that I burned. Maddening…
Are you waiting for it to pop up automatically after you put the CD in or are you navigating to the drive and finding that nothing is there?
Try using a laser lens cleaning disk in the drive. This often fixes a problematic drive with your issue.
Fubaya - I’m going to the disk and seeing nothing. I tried the disk on another computer and it’s fine, so it’s my drive. I’ll try cleaning the lens. Thanks for the suggestion.
It seems to me the music is not being read digitally through the IDE bus but rather it is going directly via analog cable to the sound card. In other words, you may have a problem on the digital IDE cable. The first thing I would do is check cable and connections.
How old is it? They all go bad eventually.
For $5 more than a cleaning doo hickey you can just buy a new one. Hell, splurge and for $25 you can get a new burner.
A new burner is only $25? Well, dang, maybe I’ll just do that. This system is (thinking) 6 or 7 years old maybe…
For $25 - $35 you can get an internal DVD player/burner, which will also play and burn CDs.