[MrsClaus]

Hi all! I'm a newboe looking for help. I took my laptop to Staples, but they said servicing back to Toshiba would be 6 weeks so I'm trying to figure it out without losing my computer for so long....I work from home some days and can't afford to lose it! It's a Toshiba Satellite A200-TJ9 running Vista.

So, here's my trouble: my cd/dvd drive won't open, meaning that the tray won't even eject so that I can load a disk. When I go to the device manager it has it's exclamation mark with the error message "Windows cannot load the device driver for this hardware. The driver may be corrupted or missing. (Code 39)".

When I go to the driver tab I do an online search to update the driver and it returns the message "windows has determined that the driver software for your device is up to date".

I uninstalled iTunes to see if there was a problem with the application, but I wonder if it's because I deleted some sonic files?

At any rate, it doesn't work and I can't figure out how to fix it so I'm turning to the pros!

Thanks SO much for anyone who can help. I really appreciate it!

[CapriAnupam]

Check the power cable for the drive. Take it out and put in again. While booting, can u see any drive activity? Its not ejecting... means there is no power supply to the drive, or the door is stuck.

[MrsClaus]

At first the light would flash that it was making an attempt, but now nothing....

[CronoT]

Almost all drives have what's referred to as a "poke hole". Take a large paper clip, and pull it apart until you have a straight metal piece about 6 inches long. Then, look for a small hole about a centimeter across, just under the tray opening.

Gently push the paper clip in, until you feel some resistance. Keep pushing gently, until you feel it move, and see the tray pop open. take a CD or DVD you don't care too much for, put it in the tray, and then close it. See if the PC can see the disc. From what you're talking about, either the molex power connector is dead or dying, or the DVD/CD drive is dead or dying.

Since it's rare for a power supply to only partially fail, I guessing the latter. It is possible that the power supply is being overused beyond it's capacity, but since you've said you're a newbie, I doubt you'd have enough things on it to cause this problem.

[K7M]

I see you are running Vista. I would go to a restore point to a date that you knew the drive was operating, do a restore, and try the drive. I looked on the Toshiba site and did not see the drivers for the model you listed. You might have a built in updater from Toshiba in the system that could find a driver from Toshiba automatically.
If that does not work, I am sorry to say your laptop should go back, especially if it's warranty.

[MrsClaus]

ok, I did it...just used the paper clip and got the tray to open. I heard the disk spinning, but the drive still does not appear in my computer and a program did not launch to play the disk.

[CronoT]

Sounds like it's your DVD/CD Drive, then. See if you have a local Mom & Pop computer supply store in your town. Most will let you bring in your PC and test it as long as you buy the item the failure is related to.

This may be a question that's too hard for you, but do you know if the drive is connected with an IDE or SATA cable?

[MrsClaus]

It's an internal drive, I can't tell...

Could it be because i deleted the operating software that came with the computer? or that iTunes did an update that messed up my registry?

[CronoT]

No, neither of those things is likely to cause the problem. If you can manually put this disc in, and you can hear it spinning up, but the PC never sees it, then the drive is probably dead.