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The CD/DVD drive is one of the more failure-prone components in a laptop. It is not uncommon for one to suddenly fail after a year or so of use. If the drive plugs into a swappable drive bay, remove and reinstall the drive. If the drive is built in to the system, open the system (if possible) and make sure the drive is properly plugged into the system. Make sure the BIOS Setup is set properly for the drive and verify that the drive is detected during the boot process. Finally, try replacing the drive and, if necessary, the motherboard. If the drive has already been installed and was working before, first try reading different discs, preferably commercial stamped discs rather than writeable or rewriteable ones. Then try the preceding steps.

Note

If a rewritable CD or DVD drive reads media but can’t write to the media, make sure the CD or DVD creation software you are using supports the drive. If you are not using the software provided with the system, you might need to download updates from the software vendor to enable support for your drive. If you are using Windows XP, you can have problems if Windows XP is configured to handle the drive as a rewritable drive and you are also using third-party software. To disable Windows XP’s own recording feature, right-click the drive in My Computer, click the Recording tab, and clear the check box next to Enable CD Recording for this drive.