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Windows 7 won't recognize CD/DVD drive

7K views 5 replies 2 participants last post by  Elvandil 
#1 ·
I have been having a problem with my CD/DVD drive. One day several months back (in May) my laptop (a Compaq Presario F750) just stopped acknowledging the existence of my cd/dvd drive. When I ran the program from Microsoft that troubleshoots issues like this, it just tells me that my computer doesn't have one attached, even though when I put a cd in the drive, I can hear it spin.
Until recently, I have just been living without the drive, believing that it just broke or was misaligned or something, and I was putting off getting a new one. However, last weekend, my hard drive crashed. We were able to rescue all of the info from the hard drive, but had to replace the drive. Somewhere in the process of all this, the CD drive started working again! We were able to get the new hard drive in, then install Windows 7. CD drive was working for a day or so after that, was able to install Office, and a couple of more programs. Then something happened and the computer crashed again. I had to do a system restore to get Windows to run again, and then everything I had loaded on CD from the previous day was gone, and the CD drive was dead again. Same thing, Windows fails to recognize its existence.
We had an old, dead, laptop with a compatible CD drive, so my husband swapped them. The "new" old drive has the exact same problem.

We are unable to figure out if we have 2 broken CD drives and a new one would fix the problem, or if there is some issue with Windows causing it not to see the drives. The drive originally on the computer was a UJ-860, and the other one that we tried second was a UJ-850
From what we can tell, there are no driver issues, because they use a default driver.

The computer originally was sold with Windows Vista, but it was compatible with Windows 7 when I upgraded. I have the original recovery disks for the computer (that have Vista on them) but when we first started to recover the computer after the hard drive crash, it would seem that one of the 3 recovery disks was corrupted. (I don't recall what the error was, but if it is significant, I could ask my hubby) We could not get Vista successfully back on the computer, but were able to install Windows 7 Upgrade from the purchased disks without having Vista installed fully.


I really just need to know which direction to go with this... buy a new CD/DVD drive? Wipe the computer and reinstall Windows? (I am hestitant to want to do this because if the CD drive still doesn't work, I am really screwed then) Talk to HP support about some kind of compatibility issue in the computer?

Would appreciate any help, suggestions, guesses, anything at this point.
Thanks
 
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#2 ·
Does the drive appear in Device Manager? Is it correctly identified in BIOS setup?

You can always try another OS. If the drive appears there, then we would know that Windows had the problem. Otherwise, it is a hardware problem (BIOS is classified as "hardware".)

Parted Magic disk partitoning tool (Bootable CD image) (A useful tool with a Linux OS that you can use to see if the drive is recognized.)
 
#3 ·
Assuming that it should be under "disk drives" in Device Manager, than no, it isn't there. (I don't see anything that looks like it anywhere else in Device Manager)
I don't know about the BIOS. I know that when we were trying to recover the computer from the hard drive crash, there were some BIOS issues, but I think that my husband got them fixed. Can you tell me how to check the BIOS?
Problem with that great tool you linked me to is that it appears to need a functioning CD drive to use it, and right now, I don't have that. :)
 
#5 ·
Any other suggestions? We had previously tried to boot the computer off of the Windows 7 disc, but it wouldn't boot off the disk, it just started Windows normally.
I have searched the HP site for an update to the BIOS, but it doesn't have Windows 7 BIOS for my computer, only Vista (that is what came installed on it)
 
#6 ·
Not a good idea to update BIOS unless absolutely necessary. Many paperwieghts have been made that way.

Sometime near when the machine starts up, there should be a prompt on how to enter "Setup" or something similar (Stop the boot screen with Pause if you need to read it.) Use that key yo enter BIOS and then look around to see if your device is listed. If not, then Windows has no access to it and it can never be recognized.

In Device Manager, are there any problem devices at all (red or yellow)?
 
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