Help with sony vaio cd/dvd drive needed - not reading anything.

closed

itunes installed?

elsien

No, I don't have itunes.
Spannerzone, I'm going to be at work at lot the next few days, but as soon as I get chance I'll have a look and let you know what (if any) progress I've made. Thanks for the suggestions so far.
Bank holiday working when the sun's out - shouldn't be allowed. I can't even come on MSE for a bit of light relief, the works computers got a virus and all the techies are off till Tuesday.

KillerWatt

Stick a bootable CD/DVD in the drive and see what happens.

If it's a hardware problem then the system won't boot from CD/DVD, but if it does boot successfully then that proves it's a software problem within Windows itself.

elsien

Right, I'm finally back again.
I've checked for any updated driver software and there isn't any, I've reinstalled the drive in the device manager, I've done a system restore to when I think it was last working, I've run all the microsoft progammes as above and I've tried rebooting from the vaio recovery disc which didn't work.
Just running the driver detective thingy. Watch this space.

elsien

With any luck, someone can translate this into something understandable for me?

(According to this, half my computer is out of date.:rotfl:)

closed

it thinks your drivers are out of date

elsien

I've checked on the sony site though, and checked for updates through device manager, and it's telling me I have the most recent version installed. So I'm not sure there's much else I can do on that front.

Does it tell me what replacement drive I need as per spannerzone's suggestion (I'm guessing it's back to the knackered hardware theory) or do I still need to get busy with a screwdriver and get the drive out for more details?

Hammyman

Eject the drive. Get a dry cotton bud. You'll see a small round glass lense near the middle of the tray. Give it a good clean with the cotton bud. If that doesn't work, its probably replacement drive time. Good news is they're cheap as chips, a DIY replacement job and pretty much all DVD/CDRW drives are interchangeable, just requiring the little metal bracket on the back and the plastic trim bezel on the tray swapping over. I've put all manner of optical drives from different manufacturers into other manufacturers laptops and never had a problem.

If you get one from your model laptop, changing it merely involves undoing a screw on the base (typically about 5 inches in from the edge where the DVD ejects and is sometimes labelled with a picture of a stack of discs), pulling the old drive out, sliding in the new one and putting the screw back.

KillerWatt

Do what I told you to do earlier on, this will prove 100% whether it is a hardware or software problem.
If it is hardware failure, all the crap you are doing now is pointless as it will never work.

elsien

I thought I had - wouldn't the recovery disc I tried be bootable? It didn't do anything, anyway.

Hammyman, I've tried cleaning the lens as well - made no odds.