My drive won`t recognise any of my dvd`s, any experts have any ideas ?
 

This is a strange one, ive never had ony problems with my toshiba satellite pro laptop in the past but all of a sudden the disc drive is not recognising any of my dvd`s. Ive tested numerous genuine discs along with ones that ive played in the past that i know have worked before.

All thats happening is the dvd will start to spin and then you get a clicking sound and it tries to spin again repeated by another clicking sound and eventually it stops in the drive. Ive tried some music discs and some play and some don`t which is odd.

Now the part i don`t get here is that i have done a fresh install of windows from disc to see if that cures things and its had no problem reading the windows install disc which is XP and its installed the drivers from disc for my wireless home connection, i`m baffled.

My drive is a Toshiba DVD-ROM SD-R2412, ive never had a problem in the past playing my dvd`s which are all genuine ones and not copies until now where it just won`t play any dvd yet it will read the windows install disc and other boot discs and the odd music disc.

Any ideas ?

Yea its fooked. Failing drives can still read some discs, but if it fails on the majority and/or dvd-r/rw then the read laser is bollocked.

Touch wood i think i may have cured it.

With it being possible that the laser might have packed up on the drive i thought i would try and give it a clean with a tiny microfibre cloth and a few squirts of compressed air.

So far ive tried 6 different dvd`s and each one has loaded up first time and played without a problem, its possible that the laser may have got dirty over time from not cleaning the discs as often as i should.

Doh of course easy to forget the obvious eh, glad it's ok again.

To be honest i never thought of cleaning the laser head at first as thats something you try and stay away from, its a sort of last resort thing where sometimes you can do more damage than good.