CD drive not working after restore

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Dbl_D718

New Member
I recently had to restore my HP laptop, and ever since I did so, my CD/DVD drive hasn't been working correctly.

It's still "working" in that if I insert a disk it'll come to life with the light flashing and you can hear it spinning, but then nothing. No autorun or anything. The device manager says the drivers are installed and up to date, and i've reinstalled them twice just to make sure.

WMP doesn't recognize that a burner is present, and there isn't even an icon for the drive in My Computer. I've got the version of Sonic that came with the computer, and it recognizes the drive as being there but won't burn anything.

Any ideas on what could be wrong? I suppose I could restore the computer again, but I'd imagine there's a better way. I'm running XP Home and the computer is about 2 years old. If you need any other info to help diagnose the problem just let me know.

Thanks so much!
-Derek
 
For an optical drive to fail to be detected and seeing the icon vanish is a more typical problem due to a small glitch in the Windows hardware detection process. A fast and generally working solution is a quick trip into the device manager to open the dvd/cd drives section and simply right clicking on the effected drive.

All you do there is choose the uninstall option in the right click menu and restart the system afterwards to have Windows properly redetect it as a new hardware. If that still fails to see immediate results the other usual cause is a bad data cable especially for an ide drive where the cable simply quits on you and needs replacement.
 
I've unistalled the drive in device manager 4 or 5 times now, restarted, and then it shows the little "new hardware" box like expected. Then that little box goes away and nothing. It never says it's installing anything.

Because the computer recognizes the drive, shouldn't that rule out a bad cable? I feel like it has to have something to do with Restoring the computer, because the drive worked fine until then, even after it crashed and I tried using boot disks to save it. After I restored the computer using the disks I made when I first got the computer, it hasn't worked right.
 
A drive can be seen even with a bad cable often but simply no signal is going through one of the... let's say path ways to see a certain function performed. That's better put as a flaky cable that works sometimes for some things.

If you did end up seeing a bad burn to one of the recovery disks or something didn't go on fully for Windows when using them that would be one possible reason. But that would likely see other problems come up. Windows knows the drive is there from the new hardware popup while it should be prompting for an answer.

"new hardware found - need drivers" is where you simply let Windows autosearch itself to see the drive reinstalled. Without seeing the "Windows has successfully installed your new hardware" message you could be looking at something not right following your restoration in Windows itself. When Windows is running normally the first uninstall should seen the drive ready to go once reinstalled.
 
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