The Medway Handyman wrote:
John Rumm wrote:
On 22/08/2010 10:35, The Medway Handyman wrote:
Hi

My PC CD drive has stopped working.

The tray opens& closes OK, but according to My Computer there is
nothing there. Tried various CD's with the same result& tried the
apparently blank CD's in SWMBO's PC and all works fine.

I'm assuming the drive is FUBER so is it just a case of buying a new
CD drive& swapping it over - which I could prolly manage, or is it
likely to be some confounded software glitch?

Advice welcome at numpty level please :-)
Assuming windows still sees the drive and gives it a drive letter, but
it just won't read any disks, the simplest and cheapest solution is
usually to bin it and replace with another.

Not the cheapest. but an ok drive:

IDE version: http://www.ebuyer.com/product/151999

SATA version: http://www.ebuyer.com/product/227080

Note those are fast DVD rewriters that will also handle all the CD
formats. You can get them from about a tenner!

For £17 I might as well get the super dooper jobby.

If you really want a bog standard CD ROM (i.e. read only, no DVD
compatibility) you will have to look at second hand probably. (in
fact I have a new unused IDE CD ROM drive on the shelf - yours for
the price of postage!

Cheers, but I'll go for the turbo nutter one :-)

I'm assuming I take the back or side off and it just unbolts?


More or less yes. Sometimes you need to take a cradle out before you can
remove the drives. Take photos of all cables etc. so if you have to
unplug everything, you know how it all goes back together.