Been working perfectly and then stopped recognizing any kind of disk all of a sudden. I've used device manager to troubleshoot which indicates everything is working properly. I've uninstalled the driver through the device manager and re-installed upon a re-start and still nothing. When I place a disk in the drive the green light blinks repeatedly but nothing else happens. The drive shows up when I go into my computer and it ejects from my computer. Does anyone have any ideas? Based upon my research it's either my disk drive needs replaced or it's the ide cable. Any help would be much appreciated. Thank You.

Chances are its not a hardware problem. Certain software issues cause cd drives not to work. Usually when it's a hardware problem, it doesn't come on so suddenly, its more of a progressive change. It starts intermittently and eventually stops.

I've had a similar issue in the past. A good test to see if it is the drive or something else would be a boot test. Get your hands on a boot disk. Knoppix, dos, anything that uses a cdrom. Pop it in the drive and reboot. Enter your bios settings and change boot order to cdrom first. Then save and exit. If the drive reads the disk, and then boots you know its not a hardware issue.

I never did figure out why mine was having problems, I ended up reinstalling the OS and it worked fine after that. If you find it is a software issue you can try a few things before you reinstall. Run a windows cd and do the repair option. The one where it replaces only system files. Do a few virus scans, I prefer malewarebytes and another, which I can't remember right now.

I will post tomorrow with more info.