My dvd drive is not working on my laptop

[Mancinism]

What does it mean when your laptop's dvd/cd drive suddenly stops working? It repeatedly makes sounds as if it's trying to read, but a few seconds after inserting a disc, it makes a series of sharp grinding noises. No disc icon is shown on the drive inside "My Computer" plus it freezes / crashes WMP if I'm using it.

 

[CompTIA_Rep]

The easiest way to verify your drive is toast is to find a CD/DVD you can boot from, such as an OS disk. If your drive is dead, it may attempt to spin up, but it will return "boot device failure" or no boot device...

 

[Mancinism]

The easiest way to verify your drive is toast is to find a CD/DVD you can boot from, such as an OS disk. If your drive is dead, it may attempt to spin up, but it will return "boot device failure" or no boot device...

I tried that, but nothing happened - I can't boot from the drive when pressing F12...

 

[CompTIA_Rep]

You should be able to attempt to boot. If the drive has problems, when you boot by pressing "f12" it should spin up the CD drive (or not) and give you an error message.

If Device not ready; no boot device found; error...; and you are sure your disk is bootable, then the drive is most likely dead.

Here are some last things to try. Turn off the laptop, pull the battery, unscrew the CD drive and remove it, put it back securely, screw it in, try it now.

 

[Mancinism]

I can't unscrew my CD drive, I have a DELL Studio XPS 16...I had to repair my computer using my installation disc today, and oddly enough that worked! But no other disc seems to...what's that about?