My disk drive won't read my recover disk or any other data. HELP

[jazzica]

I have a Toshiba Satellite 2435-S255. My cd-ROM has stopped working since I tried copying one of my children's games. I thought I would make a spare for my kids to both be able to play. I tried everything to get it to work again. I even called the company that made the game and told them what I did. They said it was not their software, that they have no copy right protection that would do that. Since then I have made a mess of my computer. I have restored it a million times in the system restore program. It is playing DVD's but no data cd's will play and it does not register any blank cd's. I went out and bought a Memorex external USB disk drive and recorder. I just want to recover my computer to factory settings using the recovery disks I have. The TEAC disk drive in the Toshiba wont read the recovery disks at all and the external drive reads the disk but when it reboots it looks for the disk in the internal and wont registers the USB drive automatically. I'm hoping their is a way to bypass the reboot and just start the recovery or any other solution. I even reassigned the drive letter and have since put it back to original.

[patio]

Check and see if Toshiba has the restore info on a hidden partition and how to proceed using it...most laptop manuf. set them up this way.

[jazzica]

How or where would a hidden partition be?

[patio]

If XP right click My Computer/select manage/ then Disk Management...if you have one it should show up there...

[jazzica]

Hey Patio I really appreciate your time with me, and hope you can excuse my ignorance with this. I found the disk management and found quite a bit I didn't know about by reading the tutorials about it but saw no BAK files. I wonder if my drive has crapped out because it starts and sounds like it dies out but then runs a DVD great. I really think it's my settings but I just need more detailed directions. I'm guessing someone who understands it will have to be paid to look at it and it will probably be something real simple. I have just spent so much more on this computer and my husband is getting very angered. I do property research and got the computer in exchange for property info and have spent about $1000. since. I have three desktops and have actually built a few for friends out of garbage that work fine so it irritates me that I don't understand this. Drive addresses and disk management? And I am so good about backing up system files and did not with this one because I felt so comfortable that I had the recovery disks. I however have backed up all my personal and research files thinking if anything went bad I could just recover the hard drive. I'm sorry if I've wasted your time and appreciate your help.

[patio]

It is possible the internal drive is getting ready to go South. Some optical drives have more than one laser in them for different functions. What jumps out at me is the fact it will read/play DVD's but not data discs. So even though the mechanics are fine one of the lasers is shot.
Depending on how much you want to invest in this laptop do some research but you'll probably find that replacement optical drives for laptops are more expensive than their desktop counterparts.

It may be time to start looking at a new laptop if that's what's needed to run your business...after all it can't be too productive having a machine you have to struggle with.

Let us know if there are any other questions and by the way none of our efforts here are wasted time...