Recently I have been unable to play discs on my CD drive. My laptop seems not to be recognising the existence of the drive. After some checking and a peek in the Bios when I logged on Windows recognised an "unknown piece of new hardware". I've let Windows do its thing and locate drivers for it but it always comes back unable to find any as does its check online for solutions. I have a Fujitsu laptop and I think the CD drive is an Opteric type drive. I've checked manually for drivers and things but there are non online and it says that the drive should be fine with the standard drivers that come with Windows Vista. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

It could be a hardware fault. Typical troubleshooting steps for this would include the following steps:

1. Reseating the current cd-rom drive to ensure it's not a simple connectivity issue. If this fails,
2. seating a known-working cd rom drive into the laptop to see if it works. If it does, then the old one is most likely faulty. If it doesn't,

3. use a voltmeter to test the drive's power supply. This may prove difficult in a laptop, since the socket is so deep inside the system. Typically there will be possible 1 or more 5V logic supplies, at least one 12 V motor/laser/etc supply, possibly a -12V supply, and a ground. To find which voltage corresponds to which pine on the socket, check a detailed online manual. If the power is fine,

4. There is most likely a scary motherboard issue. These can be hard, and often impossible to resolve. Some things to try are: a full bios restore/update, a system board firmware update, tests for overheating (bad fan?), tests for shorted caps (these can sometimes be discharged by holding the power button in, which could temporarily, or even actually solve the problem). If this all fails, reinstall the OS for the hell of it, but that likely won't fix much. At this point I'd say you're fubar.