(Panda Computers is not responsible for any damage that may occur while you are taking your computer apart. Please seek professional help if you are not comfortable working on your own computer. Do the following at your own risk.)

In this article we will talk about several reasons while DVD drives will not recognize the disc. Once again remember that this article applies also to CD drives as well as Blu-Ray drives. DVD drives use optical lasers to read a disc and transfer information to the computer so can be decoded. There are many things that can go wrong that will not won't allow this process to take place. Let us review some of the basics of how to diagnose a bad drive or other problems.

The first thing we need to check is to see if the drive is electrically alive. First open the door by pushing the button and see if the drive drawer will open. Please pay special attention to see if they activity light on the front a lot drive flashes when you open the drawer. If the drawer opens but no light flashes this could mean that the control board has failed or other local issues. If the drawer fails to open in the unit makes no noise the drive can be electrically dead. Now the drive opens and the light flashes, then we will look at other possibilities such as the software as well as the mechanics of the drive.
Let us go through a couple scenarios where we can whittle down the cause of the drive.
In this first example will assume the drive drawer opens in the light flashes normally, but, when the disc is inserted nothing happens or nothing comes up on the disc. This is caused by one of two problems.
One-Windows is not recognizing the drive properly. First go to start, control panel, device manager and see if the drive shows any problems. Please look at the pictures below.


Find the DVD/CD section to the left of the red arrow	Click on the "+" to show the drives.	Double click on drive name to reveal the properties.

In the above picture you will notice that the drive has no yellow bangs or red X's next to it. When I click on drive properties it says this drive is working properly. If we found a red X. this would tell us the drive is not being recognized and we need to look further for problem. Sometimes you will see a yellow mark called a "bang" that tells is there something wrong with this drive. Microsoft will show you a code such as "code 39" or " code 10"these codes can be helpful sometimes in finding out why the computer does not recognize the drive. Simply type the code and a brief description of your problem into your favorite search engine or Google and learn more about your problem. You may also want to just type the error code into Microsoft's knowledge base and read more about the problem your computers having reading the disc.

Example - in Google I would type" code 10 can't read from disk" I would then look at the results and find a solution to my problem. Be careful as many spammers and con artists will try to sell you a special program that will solve all your problems. Don't fall for these scams, if you're not sure what you're doing please seek professional help.
Second Reason - let's say that the drive drawer opens and closes, we look in device manager and found no errors, and we can get any discs to read. Or maybe the discs show up but nothing shows up we click on menu or try to view the disc. This is common in a laser failure, this means the drive is fully functioning, but the laser is burned out and no data can be transmitted to the computer. The only way to fix this problem is replace your drive. The only way to test for this is to remove your drive and plug in a test drive and see if it works. Most people not have a test drive, but once again the DVD drives are only about 20 bucks from newegg.com so if you work on your own computer systems having a test drive on hand is not a bad idea. Another cheap way to test your computer is find old computer from a neighbor, buddy or a friend and remove the drive and plug in your computer to see if it'll read discs, any disc will do. Once again if you're not comfortable with opening your computer and removing your drive please seek professional computer help.

The last and final scenario will look at is that your drive will read some discs but not others, or maybe the drive will read discs but won't burn a disc, what do I do now? Well this is a little harder but not that difficult to diagnose. A lot of times this is due to a weak or non-attenuating laser, in short the laser has to change its intensity of the light to be able to read or write a disc. Many times the laser will become damaged or unable to change to read or write state, thus leaving the drive to read or write but not both. Sometimes discs will not read due the fact because the drive or program just isn't compatible with the disc. If you have only one disc that won't read and your drive seems to read the rest, then it is not probably a drive issue, but with a issue with the disc.

In conclusion there are many reasons why your drive may or may not read a disc. Having a spare drive on hand or a test drive is always a good idea if you own two or more computers. Having a portable USB drive is also an easy way to see if it's the computer or the drive or windows that has the problem. Repairing or figuring out DVD drives is not really that complicated. With step-by-step reasoning you can have your computer fixed in no time.

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