DVD Drive problem

[Kelburn]

On Sunday, I was using my dvd player in my laptop to do something. I left it alone and came back after about an hour to find what I was doing had stopped. I then realised that my laptop's dvd drive had disappeared. It was not in the device manager nor in windows explorer. It still had power, and would open and shut. Later on after I had left my laptop for 9hrs, I found that the drive wasn't getting any power but toda it was but the open button wouldn't do anything.
I have tried taking it out and then pushing it back in but to no avail. Any ideas or does it look like it's a bung DVD drive that no needs to be replaced.

Any help is appreciated,
Thanks,
Kelburn

[creator2003]

Sounds bung to me, they can be costly are you under warrenty ?

[pilot.masman]

$50 - $75 depending on what drive it is (lightscribe, dual layer support, DVD RW etc) (edit: actually just had another look, $120 for a decent one. even thats a refurb)

but yeah, if its under warranty might as well get it for free even if its not under warranty, contact them and ask if they have a solution. hint at a replacement



can you tell us the model number of the drive?, a bit hard i know because its not showing in device manager but maybe pull the drive out and have a look

[Kelburn]

I'll have another look at the drive itself later. The laptop is just under 2.5years old so maybe the consumer act covers it but that'd be pushing it..
Yeah I saw $120 for a Sony brand one. So it sounds like a drive that needs replacing?
It's not a lightscribe (don't need one either) just a DVD +/- Burner (or whatever - it reads and burns all CD's and DVD's...)

Cheers,
Kelburn

[HardCorePawn]

Unfortunately, buying a replacment for a laptop is not as easy as a desktop... you cannot just slap any old dvd drive into a laptop, as usually the manufacturers all have different connectors for their expansion drive bays

What brand of laptop is it?

[Kelburn]

Acer

[Adamski]

Have you watched many movies on that laptop? If you've not got oodles of memory to buffer the video, the drive never spins down and can overheat and wear out quickly. I think the PS2's also had this problem.

Also, I've heard that excessive DVD burning can take you over a fixed "lifetime cycle" (as in a laser printer). A PC engineer told me that was a well kept secret. "Planned obsolescence" is the term