Laptop officially hates discs.

[hack17up]

My mom has an affinity to spawn ridiculous problems with computers, and now I have one to share with you, that I really would appreciate a solution to.

Inspiron-1520, can't remember cd drive and stuff but the thing is the cd drive comes up as gone, i've tried to replace it and it won't work, I've tried replacing the actual drive and that won't work, i've tried to use an external usb drive and that won't work although the usb devices work fine, and i've even tried mountind cd images with DT and Virtual clone drive

when i try to mount the images with dt i cannot assign a drive letter, and it won't appear in my pc

when i try to mount the images in virtual clone drive i can't even succesfully create a virtual drive, they won't show up in my computer

this is getting ridiculous, please help 

[Geek-9pm]

Welcome to CH.
Did you read over the topic that says read this first?

Reading your post over twice it is rather hard to understand what the exact problem is. For one, it is not clear if you're talking about a laptop or desktop computer.
From what you describe it would seem that the cable to the drives has come loose and you did not reset it properly.
Please provide more information and help us to understand if you're talking about one problem or two problems. Are you talking about something that happened all at once? Or are you talking about events that occurred over a period of time and now you want to put everything into one topic?

[hack17up]

it is a laptop

the drive is connected

it all occurred at once, it's just that after no fix could be found I tried to loop around the problem with external/virtual drives with no results.

No one seems to know what the problem is 

[Geek-9pm]

If you have a home network and another computer, you can get files off the other computer with file sharing. This is the easy workaround.

But that will not work for many games that require a physical CD-ROM.

Your motherboard may have had some damage.

But first, you need to get into the BIOS and see if the settings are correct. It is possible that the CMOS got messed up.  There is a place where you turn off the CD-ROM drive, Check that out.

[hack17up]

For some reason I think that I have already checked the bios out, but I can always check again.

And your file sharing solution won't work, because like I said, it seems that the computer completely refuses to read cd images, even the files.

I believe that last time I checked the BIOS, cd-rom either wasn't even there, or was lookin fine, I can't remember, but I will get back to you on this asap.

[JJ 3000]

I believe that last time I checked the BIOS, cd-rom either wasn't even there, or was lookin fine, I can't remember, but I will get back to you on this asap.

That would be the best place to start. Does the CD drive show up in BIOS?

[patio]

Most laptop optical drives have a small release button on the side that physically ejects the drive from the machine...
Press this and remove the drive and re-seat it.
Do this with the power off and the battery removed.

[Helpmeh]

Most laptop optical drives have a small release button on the side that physically ejects the drive from the machine...
Press this and remove the drive and re-seat it.
Do this with the power off and the battery removed.

I'm pretty sure you can do it also with the power on (Safely remove hardware recognizes my disk drive [a Dell Inspiron also]) but I strongly suggest doing it while the power is off, as there is less chance of anything going wrong.

[dahlarbear]

See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314060.