I have a 2year old Advent 8117 laptop fitted with a Sony Optiarc AD7650 DVD drive. It has suddenly stopped recognising any type of CD be they commercial audio CDs, CD-Rs or CD-RW, blank or recorded. The drive spins and attempts to read for a good minute to 90secs then stops and Explorer etc says no disc in drive. I have absolutely no problem with DVDs of any description. I believe the drive to be faulty unless anyone can suggest another likely cause. If the drive is faulty can anyone tell me how to get to it to replace it - it's the Uniwill L71II3 chassis and I'm running Vista Home Premium with SP2 and all updates, latest drivers etc. Any ideas much appreciated.

hello again,

it is not worth replacing.
copy your music to DVD every DVd can record 4.7 GB as opposed to cd which is 700MB
ie a fraction .
or even better use USB memory stick .
I bought a Sandisk 4BG for only £8 from Morrisons 2 weeks ago.

Ben

Thanks for the advice. Unfortunately I need CD access as I want to transfer my rather large CD collection to HDD. I think I may have to opt for an external USB drive if I can't find another solution to the problem.

Thanks again

Steve