Help an old man with an older father who has a balky drive

Hi all,

Hoping you can help an XP user who is trying to help his father, through Crossloop, who is using a Gateway NV53 laptop, equipped with Win7 Home Personal. Dad's got a functioning Win2K desktop, but I thought he'd be happier with a modern-day laptop. I was wrong. So it's been largely disused for the last six months. Today, he calls and tells me it won't play music disks.

I log in remotely and find he's right. No matter the file-browser, if he sticks a disk in (which doesn't register, even though autoplay for audio and special audio disks is enabled), it doesn't do anything until the file-browser tries to touch drive D:. Then it ejects the disk, puts up a dialog with only a cancel button, asks for the disk to be inserted. Naturally, he tried several different kinds of disks, including store-bought audio and self-made audio disks, all of which play on his desktop machine. None work. Neither do blank CDs or DVDs. I tried those, because when the Insert box comes up, there's a Tell Me more link, which goes to some explaination about BURNING disks. My father admitted, that at one point, out of frustration, and having read that message, he started up Windows Media Player and clicked the Burn button. To no discernable effect.

He insists it was only in RESPONSE to the question that he followed through. He also has CDXPBurnerPro on his computer. I loaded that and found the program insisted there were no compatible disk drives. I went through the device manager in the control panel and IT insisted everything was working. Drivers up to date and all of that. I looked through the task scheduler and the task manager, looking for some rogue program and found none that I thought were obviously in the wrong. All 'seemed' to be original equipment programs. All had file dates on or before the date the system was set up for him.

Frankly, I've run out of ideas and I am swimming in different territories here. I haven't made the move the W7 on any of my three machines, although a Christmas Present machine is expected in a fortnight. That one will arrive with W7 installed. Technically, I guess I'm about 20 pages ahead of Dad in the manual [G].

Anybody got any ideas?

Thanks in advance, GM

kword, Sorry for the delay getting back to you. I was finally able to get to the computer in question earlier today and run the troubleshooter. It made a valiant effort but ultimately failed. Since the machine was purchased up here, rather than down there, I'm going to forego trying to get the drive fixed. It's broken. So I'm going to purchase an external LG 8X drive and be done with the issue. It's going to be a $70 solution and replacement parts and labour won't come close to matching that price, ignoring time costs and the issue of transportation to and fro from 200 miles away. Needless to say, I'm done with the dealer up here. I was back at the store THREE times over the purchase of this laptop, having ordered a different one from their website for pickup at the store, then getting the wrong one in the box and finally having to have the store send over a power wart when this last computer turned up without one. A futzed up disk drive? I should have expected it. Thanks for listening to me kvetch. GM