DVD is not recognised on my laptop

[Lorraine]

Hi all,

I am having a bit of bother, the dvd drive on my laptop is not reading or playing any disks (dvd's or cd's). I am using a acer aspire 5535, windows xp professional, sp 3. I recently installed VLC media player and was having no problems until recently now whenever I try to play a disk all I get an error message that reads:  Your input can't be opened: VLC is unable to open the MRL 'dvd://F:\'. Check the log for details.. I have tried uninstalling the vlc player and reinstalling it but still no luck. I can't even burn an audio cd, I've tried to manually access it from my computer but still nothing. Would anyone have any idea of what I need to to. I hope I have given enough info on the problem, any help on this would be appreciated.

Thank you

[Geek-9pm]

Do you have any CDs of DVDs that are notable?
One example is the memory test from Microsoft that boots from a CD. You can use it to test and see if the computer can read from the drive even before the operation system starts. If your laptop does not even try to boot from the CD, it would mean the the drive is not working.
Of curse, you need to look into the BIOS and nee if the option to boot first from CD has been set up. And if the BIOS  does not even show the CD drive present, that wold be a sure sign the drive has become inactive and needs repair or replacement.
Microsoft Windows Memory Diagnostic
(To Use the program above, you have to have a PC that can burn a CD image.)

[steve8080]

try to upgrade the firmware or the DVD reader or else you will have to change the drive.

[truenorth]

If you have access to an external optical device (cd/dvd) try that and compare the result. If it recognizes and can be used then the problem would seem more likely to be the hardware than any associated software. truenorth