The most basic and potentially most disastrous problem that can occur with a CD or DVD drive is a stuck tray. Will the tray eject when you press the eject button? Press it once, like a doorbell, and then move your finger away, or you may be sending it repeated open and close commands. The drive won't pop right open if it is actively playing a disc, and the operating system may be able to override the stop and open command. If you're trying to eject a music CD using Media Player software (clicking on a software eject button on the screen) and it doesn't work, try the manual button on the drive. If this is a newly installed drive, make sure you used the short screws shipped with the drive and not longer screws which can jam the mechanism. If there's a disc in the drive that can no longer be read, make sure the power supply lead is still seated in the socket on the back of the drive.

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Shut down, restart, and try again. If the tray still doesn't eject, reboot again and note whether the BIOS registers the drive. Some brand name PCs don't report installed hardware on a boot screen, so you'll have to access CMOS Setup to check. If the BIOS doesn't registered the drive, it may have dropped dead. I've seen CD recorders as cheap as $19.95 and CD players for less, so you know they aren't built to last forever. Proceed to IDE Drive Failure if the BIOS no longer registers the drive.

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Assuming the drive is still registered by the BIOS and operating system, you really do have a stuck disc. The next step is to look for a pinhole on the front of the CD or DVD drive. Power down the system and unplug the power cord, then straighten out a couple inches worth of paper clip, the heaviest gauge that will fit in the hole. Gently push the paper clip straight into the hole, until you feel it depress the release mechanism. This will sometime cause the tray to pop out a fraction of an inch, other times you will have to pry it a little to get it started. Once you have enough tray sticking out to grab it with your fingers, you should be able to pull it out, though it can offer quite a bit of resistance, and you may damage whatever disc is inside. If the faceplate seems to be bulging as you pull, the disc is hung up on it, and the best thing to do is remove the drive from the PC and then remove the faceplate.

The faceplate is normally held on by simple plastic clips working from the inside out. Gently depress them into the side of the drive while removing the faceplate so you don't break them off. If you have removed the drive from the system, tried the manual pinhole release, removed the faceplate and still can't get the disc out, you have a problem. I've taken whole drives apart with no luck. If there's a mechanical failure, it probably isn't repairable without access to parts. At this point, I usually just pry and pray. If I had a DVDR worth several hundred dollars, I'd consider sending it out.

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Does the drive read discs? When you mount a disc, be it software or music, does the drive acknowledge that a disc is present and let you view the contents? It doesn't matter (at this point) whether or not you can get through installing the software on the disc or read all of the information. The question is simply, can the drive see anything at all on the disc?

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Do you have CD and DVD drives installed? It's easy enough to mix up drives on a PC, and a CD drive isn't going to going to have much luck reading a DVD. A CD recorder along with a DVD player is a common two drive combination, but the DVD may not be able to read CDs recorded just two inches away. See CD or DVD Recording Problem if you're having trouble reading a recorded disc. Some older systems have both a CD ROM (reader) and a CDR (recorder).

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Are you reading the right drive? If you have two physical drives, make sure the operating system is actually looking at the drive the CD or DVD has been placed in. Trust me, I've been fooled myself into opening up a machine by blind belief in the wrong drive letter. Most drives have an activity LED that tells you when the drive is active. Make sure the activity LED is lighting up on the drive you put the disc in when you try to read it.

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Does the drive read other discs? Try another disc, a factory CD in CD ROMs or CDRs or a factory DVD in DVD ROMs or DVDRs. If it works, the problem is with the media and not the drive. Make sure the disc you can't read is the right type for the drive your are trying it in, ie, CD, DVD, CDR, DVDR, noting that many of the recordable discs won't be readable in other players. Clean the disc with a soft bit of flannel. The discs are plastics, so don't use solvents. Scratches can render a disc unreadable, including scratches on the surface (label), which cause distortions in the layer that is actually being read from the bottom. Try the disc in another reader before chucking it out, it could just have trouble with the device you were trying it in.

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Does the drive show up in the operating system, on your desktop or in Device Manager in Windows operating systems? If not, the first step is to reinstall the driver. Get the latest driver from the manufacturer's website and install it. If you can boot an OS CD in the drive, but the drive has disappeared from Device Manager, try reinstalling the OS. If that doesn't make Device Manager happy, see if there's a firmware update for the drive itself, though flashing a drive, just like flashing a motherboard BIOS, should be a last resort. Even though the BIOS registers the drive's presence, you can still try swapping the ribbon cable. Try changing the transfer mode the CD is operating in CMOS Setup to a lower speed, if that's possible. Try swapping the drive to another lead from the power supply, even though it's already "awake" enough for the BIOS to have registered its presence. The laser lens in the drive could be incredibly dirty, so if you can find an inexpensive cleaning kit, it's worth a try.

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You could have a simple cabling problem or Master/Slave conflict. If the drive is the Slave on primary IDE controller with the hard drive, move it to the secondary IDE controller as the Master (requires another IDE ribbon cable). If you already have another device installed as the secondary Master, you can try the drive as the secondary Slave or temporarily replace the secondary Master for the sake of seeing if it will work. If the BIOS is new enough (say, post 1997) to identify individual IDE devices on the power up screen and it doesn't see your IDE CD or DVD, you aren't going to get it to work.

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Can you listen to music CDs through your speakers? The following assumes that you can get operating system sounds to play from your speakers. If not, proceed to Sound Failure. First, make sure that the volume controls in software aren't turned down. Next, if the drive is equipped with an audio jack on the front, stick in a cheap headphone (if you have one) and see if the CD is playing. In any case, if the CD is spinning and the time is advancing in whatever version of Media Player you have installed, the drive is actually playing the CD. The audio patch cord from the drive to the sound card or the sound port on the motherboard may not be connected, or the device volume could be turned down in a software mixer panel. The easy check for incorrect audio patch cable (3 or 4 wires) connection without opening the PC is to try a multimedia CD, such as a game. If the sound works in the game, the problem is a missing or improperly connected cable. Note also that in two drive systems, the builder may only have patched the audio output of one of the drives through to the sound card.

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Does the drive cause the whole PC to tremble when it spins up? Is it noisy? Make sure that the drive, if internal, is mounted with four screws, and level. Super high speed drives, say anything over 40X, will vibrate like crazy if a disc is off balance, either because it was chucked up wrong on the spindle, or because the disc itself has some weighting problem. Aside from obvious physical flaws (like the dog or the kid took a bite out of the edge of the disc) a miss-applied label can create an unbalanced disc. Try ejecting and reinserting the disc. I wouldn't keep running a drive that vibrates badly. It could end up damaging the discs (discs have been known to shatter at high speeds) and it doesn't do the other components in your system any good to be vibrated, which can lead to connections working apart or worse. If the problem only occurs with some discs, you can blame the discs. Otherwise, I'd look into a new drive.

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Does your problem involve recording CDs or DVDs? If so, proceed to CD/DVD Recording Problems. For a problem booting a factory CD in a recorder, stay here. It's become increasingly difficult to tell factory pressed CDs from recorded CDs, due to the highly polished labels that can be easily printed for recorded CDs and DVDs. Factory produced discs are usually silver on the read surface, while recorded discs are often gold or green.

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Does your system refuse to boot known good boot CDs, like operating systems from Windows 98 on up? Try setting the boot sequence in CMOS Setup to boot to the CD or DVD first. This shouldn't really be necessary if the hard drive is uninitiated, but I've seen it fix the problem. I've also seen some high speed drives which take too long to spin up and report to the BIOS that there's a bootable disc present. Sometimes you can get around this by opening and closing the tray, which should cause the drive to spin up, and hitting reset right after you've done so. With any luck, you'll get the timing right so that the BIOS checks for a bootable CD while the drive is still active

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