My computer has stopped acknowledging CD's in the Disc Drive.

[wasteofo2]

A few minutes ago, I had a CD in my computer which I was listening to. I switched the CD for another one, and it didn't recognize that CD. I tried 4 other CD's, and my computer keeps showing a little icon oc a CD next to my mouse right when the CD is put in, but then acts as if there's no CD in there. I recently has to reformat my whole computer, but these are all CD's which I had copied to my hard drive in the past, and they work on my actual CD player, so I have no idea what's going on with this.

Anyone have a clue what's up?

 

[wasteofo2]

Ok, after some experimentation, I've discovered that burned CD's work (whether self-made compilations or copies of actual CD's), but no actual CD's that I've bought from a store (whether I've copied them already or not) work.

Goddamned Dells...

 

[Astronuc]

The system Registry fiel could have gotten corrupted. I had that experience with a Compaq running Win95.

You could try going through device manager and fix it that way, perhaps reinstalling the driver. The most extreme case, delete it in Device Manager, and shutdown the PC. Disconnect the CD, and restart. Then shutdown again, reconnect the CD and startup again, and let Windows do plug and play, unless you have the CD-manufacturer's install disc, then use that instead.

It's not a problem with Dell - it's a Microsoft problem. Occasionally the Windows OS gets corrupted.

 

[franznietzsche]

Ah, the joys of not using crappy pre-packaged hardware, or crappy operating systems.

Actually, I've never seen this at all. My guess would be as astronuc said, something got corrupted.

 

[Artman]

Just try a simple restart first. If that doesn't work, follow Astronuc's suggestion.

 

[BobG]

Before you start messing with the computer's registry and so on, try cleaning the lens with a can of compressed air.

Playstations are notorious for that. It the lens gets dusty, they start acting up on DVD's first, then eventually start having problems reading games, as well.

 

[Moonbear]

Good point BobG! It may be no coincidence either that this is happening as the weather is changing wildly. A bit of condensation on the lens from temperature/humidity changes can cause sporadic problems reading CDs too.

I had assumed Waste knows enough to simply try restarting the computer before doing anything else more drastic (or even deciding it's really a problem).