My Toshiba laptop had windows xp home edition already set up when we bought it. My dvd/cd rw is now not working at all, as in it wont read ANY disc I put in. So I went to the control panel and tried to go to device manager I noticed I can't find it on my laptop at all, I did a search for it and nothing came up. Somebody told me it should be here and because it's not my friend said he does not know what to do to get my laptop to play discs… Please help?!?!?!?
There are a few reasons for disks not being read, and they pretty much all relate to needing a new drive, or if your lucky just new media, being a laptop it will cost a bit more for a drive than for a desktop, but it should still be affordable, but the most likely cause of failing to read disks is dirty lenses, there are 2 in such drives, 1 for CD and 1 for DVD, and you often see one or the other stop working before the other, based on the disk type you use the most, the alternate cause is it just does not like some specific media, only way to test that is to borrow friends media to see if they are picked up, but most commonly it's the lenses.
Now the fact you can't see the drive in the device manager is a curve ball you could do without, not sure how able\comfortable you are with this, but assuming it is a simple task to remove the optical drive, I would power off, remove battery, then remove the drive, the last one I noticed only had a single screw (that I recall), I just undid that and the drive slid straight out, if you can do this without risk then do it and power up the system without the drive in it, run junk file cleaners to clear temp files etc (not sure if that would help, but it can't hurt), check the device manager again, then shut down as before remove power then put the drive back in, boot up again then see if the system picks it up, if it doesn't then you probably need a new drive.
But if it still doesn't show after that, it would be worth running some 3rd party system info software to see if that picks up the drive, if your comfortable and know how it wouldn't hurt to see if it shows in the bios, we can help with these options if the above yields no results, also if your not sure how to remove the drive, reply with the exact model number and we can try and find out for you what to do.
