CDDVD Suddenly Won't Read Blank Media

I think at this stage a clean install is probably your best bet.

Do you have a Windows DVD?

Clean Install Windows 7

If you don't have any means of recovery, check this tutorial.

Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7

After quickly exhausting other possibilities, I tried booting from my W7 Repair disc... only the CD drive would not boot from the disc, even though it was reading everything but blanks before! Then found my old Dell laptop and removed the CD drive, but it had a different port. So pilfered one from my Toshiba, and it fit fine.

Windows repair, however, could not solve the problem. So the only other choice was restoring a week old backup, which was made right before I installed the program that seemed to screw up AutoPlay. (Didn't want to have to do this but it was the only viable option left.)

So got that going... and in the middle of restoring the drive the laptop turned off as if power had been cut. D'oh!! (Turns out I forgot to plug it back into AC after installing the CD drive!) That'll do it!

After that I could not boot from the Macrium CD anymore... it would get to a point and the screen would go blank... finally an internal DOS system (not Macrium) screen appeared saying the master boot record was missing and something else... well yeah, b/c the restore process got truncated! So had to install Windows from scratch, so that I could boot from the Macrium CD again, to restore my week old backup.

The point being, the offending drive that started this thread is no longer in the machine, and the present incarnation of my OS has not been fnarkled by the program that fnarkled the previous incarnation.

However, in the interest of tying up loose ends, I did stick the misbehaving drive in the Toshiba, and both under Linux and in the Toshiba it still cannot read blank discs, (though it does play music CDs fine). So my conclusion is that if it behaves the same way on another machine and also under another OS, it's gone to the dark side. I will be chucking it.

I will mark the thread solved, though "resolved" is more like it. Thanks again for your help, guys.

seavixen32 said:

I think at this stage a clean install is probably your best bet.

Do you have a Windows DVD?

Clean Install Windows 7

If you don't have any means of recovery, check this tutorial.

Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7

Thanks Seavixen32... was one step ahead...

Have a most excellent weekend. Libations on me. :)

I was having similar problems first native windows 7 dvd burning stopped working.. then my burner started asking me to format discs manually.. then the format option on the context menu vanished. I stumbled upon the solution on accident. Apparently you don't want to go pulling USB flash drives in and out at will without following proper eject procedures or this can really mess with your DVD burners functionality. My fix was to plug in my usb flash drive and properly eject it before removing it. Seems very weird but now my DVD burner works just fine.