A friend of mine let me borrow his laptop, so that I could work on it. I've gotten everything working again except for its dvd drive. Apparently, it suddenly stopped working some time ago (the exact time, I have no idea). The confusing part about it is that it spins up like normal upon startup, and if you put in a cd, it would try to read it, but the OS won't recognize it or detect it in device manager. Currently, the laptop is running XP sp3. It used to run on vista (which is what it was running when the drive first stopped working). And, according to my friend, he's had the drive replaced once before, as the previous one did the same thing.

I've tried a few things, and have googled around, but haven't been able to find anything that has worked so far. So here I am. Any ideas, massassi?

New driver?
*shrugs*

I have seen some laptop drives fail in interesting ways, recently a coworker's laptop refused to read standard audio or data CDROMS, but would still read DVD's.

I would guess its a hardware failure, and not a driver issue. Especially if you cant boot from the DVD/CD.

find the model number and try flashing the firmware... wouldn't hurt to try

My DVD+/-RW drive can't read or write DVD+/-RWs. It has no problems with CD-ROMs, DVD-ROMs, or CD-RWs. My dad thinks it's dust. Everytime I say I should get a new one, he tells me I should clean it. When I ask him to help me he claims he doesn't know how. Repeat ad nauseum until I use his dvd burner.

I tried looking for firmware, but didn't find anything of use... also checked on the manufacturer's website, but couldnt even find the model... its a Panasonic/Mat****a UJ-850

does it show up in the laptop's bios? can you boot from it?

if you can't boot from it, it's not a software issue. if it's hardware, there's not much you can do to fix it.

no and nope.... also he told me not to worry with it, since its now running... so... at least a shot was given at it