Someone must know how I can fix my disc drive?  

madtownidiot said:

Liisa said:

Dell Inspiron 545, Desktop

that's not enough info.. with a Dell you have to know the 7 digit service tag in order to get a list of hardware. if you don't know what it is or how to find it, go to support.dell.com, click on drivers and downloads, then below where it says enter your service tag, there's a link where Dell can find it for you.

I did the scan and it says the service tag is 2CHBL4J :)

Keiichi25 said:

Are you running on one hard drive, or more than one?

You state it was having problems recognizing discs, so how old is this computer by any chance? When did you get it from Dell or from a store?

Try also rebooting the computer one more time, see if you can get it to see any CD/DVDs you have.

First guess is that the CD/DVD drive may have gone bad. If it is an old computer, it might not be under warranty anymore and you may need to just have the DVD drive replaced.

Worst case scenario - System is going really bad.

I only bought it in January this year and I haven't had any trouble with it until now. I've done other system restores on the advice of friends but nothing. If I insert a disc and click on the drive from 'my computer' it simply opens the disc tray and tells me to insert something. It just won't recognise that there's even something there.

If you can get to the start menu type in "event" (without the quotes) then click on "view event logs". Go through the various logs to see if anything shows up at about the time you first began experiencing the problems.

From the start menu you could also type in "device manager" (again, no quotes) and then click on Device Manager. See if anything shows either a yellow triangle with an exclamation mark (!) or a red X. Let us know if either the event logs or device manager shows anything.

marsmimar said:

If you can get to the start menu type in "event" (without the quotes) then click on "view event logs". Go through the various logs to see if anything shows up at about the time you first began experiencing the problems.

From the start menu you could also type in "device manager" (again, no quotes) and then click on Device Manager. See if anything shows either a yellow triangle with an exclamation mark (!) or a red X. Let us know if either the event logs or device manager shows anything.

Ok done both of those, in the device manager there aren't exclamations or crosses however in some of the logs there are quite a lot of them especially in the administrative ones.

madtownidiot said:

okay.. this page lists firmware upgrades for 12 different types of DVD drive (see what I mean), it's a known issue with that particular model.

So what you need to do is check device manager for the type of dvd drive you have and if it's not there, restart and hit f2 repeatedly to get into the bios setup and find out that way,
if it's not in BIOS you've got a bad DVD drive,
here's the service manual.. Attachment 99799 ..which should help, as I'm not familiar with that particular BIOS.

through device manager I clicked drives and the only one listed is this one TSSTcorp DVD+-RW TS-H653G ATA Device.

is that it?

I only have one drive so I guess it has to be?

Sorry if I sound like a div, I guess I should really learn more about computers since I like to use them so much. Thanks for all the help yous are giving anyway :)

everyone has to learn somewhere.. at least you're trying to learn how to fix it yourself instead of paying someone to do it for you..so try the firmware update. and let us know how it works

If possible, set a restore point just in case the update makes things worse.

System Restore Point - Create