Need help w/ DVD drive on laptop

blue_elle

Put a disc in my drive yesterday and...nothing. The disc spins, the light on the drive comes on, but nothing happens. I tried to open it manually and the drive doesn't show up at all. I checked the device manager and it says "Windows successfully loaded the device driver for this hardware but cannot find the hardware device. (Code 41)"

My husband's first reaction was that a cable must have come loose, but it's getting power and the light comes on when the disc is put in. I thought the power and information exchange used the same cable. Is it possible that the cable is bad, providing power but not transmitting information? Or is this perhaps an issue somewhere in the system itself?

monkeygirl18

DH just helped someone else fix this problem. He's not sure if what he came up with actually fixed it but it is fixed.

xyz emailed me yesterday describing the problem you are having with the CD ROM drive on your computer. I talked to xyz last night and she sent me your email. Being that you've replaced the CD ROM with several different drives and it still doesn't function it sounds like it's not a hardware issue but probably something in Windows XP itself. Assuming Windows XP is the Operating System installed on the computer. xyz also said you're getting an Error 41. I've never seen this issue myself but I googled and Microsoft has a knowlege base article which describes the issue you're seeing and offers a fix. Here's the link:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314060

  Hmmmm. The auto fix should do the same thing as the manual fix so if that didn't work, the manual fix most likely wouldn't work either. You could try it. As long as you only delete the 2 items the article mentions you will be safe.

What kind of cd rom drives have you tried? I was under the impression one of them was an internal CD ROM which replaced the original and another was an external which plugged into a USB port. If it is USB and you have other things such as a camera which plug in to the USB port and they still work then it is probably not a hardware issue.

If you right click on My Computer, Manage, Disk Management do you see any CD ROM drives listed? See the attached screen cap.

Also have you tried in Device Manager deleting the CD ROM drive and rebooting to let Windows re-install it.

LittleSweetie

Is it a DVD with a label on it?  My work PC laptop doesn't like DVDs with stickers/labels on them, only raw disks or screen printed labels.

You can open the drive by putting the end of a paper clip into the little hole by the eject button on the drive.  HTH 

blue_elle

Thanks for the replies. I was able from the technical error to find a fix by changing the registries. I think this is what the first reply was getting at. Everything seems to be working fine now!