Optical drive has lost its functionality.

Kommandant45

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Jun 27, 2009
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A few months ago, my optical drive on my HP Pavillion laptop stopped working. It will not read disks of any kind, DVD's, CD's. I have contacted HP about the problem, and they told me to check the BIOS, and check Device Manager to check if the drive was being detected. No luck. I am wondering if this is a hardware problem or if it could somehow still be software.

PS. I installed the Windows 7 Beta back in April and recently uninstalled it. I am wondering if that could be the issue.
 
You could try pulling the drive out and then reseating it, esp. if you travel a lot with the lappy as it is slightly possible the connectors got jostled loose. Then I would try flashing the firmware with the latest download version, but with no activity or detection going on, this is pretty remote too. As for the W7 beta, I seriously doubt that would cause the lappy's BIOS to stop detecting the drive as no OS is loaded at that point in the bootup process, but you could always try resetting the BIOS to the default settings.