I’ve just noticed a very odd thing on my HP notebook (it’s a pavilion ze5170 if that will matter) using Windows XP Home Edition (w/ SP2). Whenever I insert a blank CD to try to burn, I get an error that there is no CD in the drive. Whenever I insert any other CD in the drive, nothing autoruns, and trying to access the drive via the D:\ in Windows Explorer yields a “Windows cannot read from this disk. The data might be corrupted” message. For any and all CDs that I have been able to read in the past.
Has my drive gone bad (I hope not), or is there something else I can troubleshoot?
This behavior is generally indicative of CD drive failure. You can try using a cleaning CD disk and see if this helps, but most of the time the errors you are experiencing with known good media means the drive hardware is malfunctioning.
If you’re talking a CD-RW, unless you’re pretty cash-strapped, I don’t see why you’re worried. They’re pretty much commodities nowadays; when there’s problems with CD drives, my father (reasonably capable with such things) generally tries buying a new one first, since it’s so easy and cheap.
astro has it right. If Windows Explorer sees the drive but you can’t read or write any disk in it, I’d say that is very strong evidence it is a hardware issue. Since you basically have nothing to lose, you might try using Device Manager to uninsall the drive and then reboot and let Windows find the new hardware and reinstall the drivers. I usually do that sort of thing just so I can say that I have tried everything I could think of before I pronounce the drive dead.