Toshiba Satelite DVD Will Not Work

My son's laptop's DVD will not work. Going into the Device Mgr does not show a DVD drive. I went to Toshiba's website and downloaded the newest driver and installed it. A menu popped up saying a driver was already installed. I went ahead and installed the new one. Still, no luck. Could his drive be dead and this is the reason Device Mgr is not showing a DVD drive?

Ray

 

Could be dead, but maybe just internally disconnected. You need a shop to look at it.

 

Dead DVD

Thanks. I'll recommend that to my son. I've tried several things and none of them work.

Ray

 

Some checks for you:
If the drive has an LED, does it flash at startup?
Go into the BIOS/CMOS settings at startup. Check the drive configuration. Optical drives may or may not be loaded at this point. If not you will need to check the Configuration screen that appears after POST (not sure about laptops, but you can use the Pause key on a desktop to scroll through startup pages one at a time).
Read the User Guide. It should even describe how to change the drive yourself:
http://www.csd.toshiba.com/cgi-bin/...ineID=cccgaddhjdmjfdkcgfkceghdgngdgmm.0&ct=SB
Check for the settings for the drives in the BIOS settings, you may be able to change the settings so that the drive is redetected (like setting an IDE channel to Auto or a "CD" setting).
Try booting to a bootable CD (or a Windows 98 startup disk and see if it loads the CD drivers). If it loads then the problem is in Windows.
In Windows uninstall the IDE Controller and let Windows reinstall when you reboot (if you know the drive is being detected at startup).

If the cost of replacement is high, consider an external USB drive, although you should run it from a self-powered USB hub.

Matt