Laptop Disk Drive Issue

[HumanMage]

My roommate is having trouble with his Dell laptop's disk drive. He has a Starcraft disc inside the drive but it will neither open, nor recognize the disc inside it. The model is an Inspiron 1520 if that helps. Anyone have any ideas what could be causing this issue?

 

[The_Other_One]

Get the disk out(either while it's rebooting or manually with a paper clip) and try another disk. My initial guess is the drive is bad.

 

[HumanMage]

A paper clip? How would I do that? I don't want to mess up my room mates computer . How could a drive just go bad like that?

 

[The_Other_One]

Jab at it hard enough and eventually it'll pop open......

Most drives have some form of emergency eject.

 

[HumanMage]

Hmm that won't ruin anything will it?

Well I tried that. I got the disc out, and I do think now that the drive is dead. That sucks for him because he has no real way of getting it fixed. The ITS people here at school won't be able to do much for him will they?

 

[The_Other_One]

Sorry for the late-ish response. I was being sarcastic about jabbing the drive Look for the emergency eject button. It should pop right out.