cds wont read or burn but dvds will

[flutie715]

My computer wont currently read or burn cds but it will read dvds and burn them as well. any help would be awesome

[Aegis]

There may be different lasers in the system.  The one which handles DVD's is still working.  The one which handles CD's is not.

[flutie715]

is there any way i can get it work again?

[Allan]

Do you have a BOOTABLE cd? If so, make sure the cd is at the top of the boot order in bios, insert the bootable cd and reboot. Does the system boot to the cd? If not, the drive is shot. If it does, the problem lies within Windows, not the drive.

[Mulreay]

is there any way i can get it work again?

Do you burn a lot of CD's if so you may have burnt out the CD laser.

[Hateadub]

DRIVERS!

almost every cd drive i come across that wont load is either broke, or it has corrupted drivers. I would uninstall it, then install new drivers for it. Since your cd drive works half and half, i would really try the driver idea. good luck.

[patio]

Optical drives haven't required Drivers since WinME...you can safely ignore the above advice.

[BC_Programmer]

Optical drives haven't required Drivers since WinME...you can safely ignore the above advice.

Seconded.

[Hateadub]

I have removed the cd drives under device manager and then reinstalled them with newer drivers on a friends laptop, and it worked. I know you never have to download updates, or the driver itself once you install OS, but if it stops working, its definitely something you can try.

[BC_Programmer]

there aren't even different VERSIONS of the driver- it's a generic driver for a entire class of devices, much like the floppy driver works with any floppy drive. The uninstall/reboot method is however a perfectly good way of fixing Drive issues, but it does absolutely nothing to update the driver.

The issue in that case is corrupted registry entries in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet as well as HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\HARDWARE etc etc. by uninstall the driver in device manager and allowing windows to redetect the drive, the entries are re-created once again (when windows refers to the appropriate INF file that is stored in the windows folder)