Thinkpads Forum

A friend of mine has a problem with an R40 reading disks in an optical drive (in the ultrabay). They have had IT people look at it, and they can't figure it out. He is stuck using an external DVD drive.

I think that there is a software or driver issue.

They have tried several optical drives in the R40, including my own DVD/CDRW drive, and it says "No disk in drive", while testing an audio CD with WMP 9.

They have also tried removing the hard drive and placed it into another R40, and had the same problem.

He has A LOT of important information on the hard drive and can't really be without his information long enough for them to send it in to the main IT location for testing.

I only had about 3 minutes to look at it today. I opened the Device manager to see if there were any exclamations, relating to the drive and their wasn't...though, in retrospect, I didn't get to look through each of the devices to see what was listed....just long enough to see the lack of exclamations. (we were in a hurry to leave).

I know that the system is pretty locked down, since it is a corporate laptop. They are talking about sending him a replacement....with a DELL...but, he really wants to stick with the R40.

Also, it does read a floppy drive that is currently installed, in the ultrabay.

Any suggestions?

Perhaps the following from the ** New ** HOW TO's & FAQ's ** forum?

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=37869

Thanks Gom...I will take a look at his system again today, but I am pretty sure that this might not be it, because those errors generally put a yellow exclamation in the Device Manager.

I had a problem on a desktop PC once where after I applied a firmware update to a Plextor CD/RW drive, my backup software could not use the drive anymore. However I was still able to use the drive for general reading and writing. I tried applying the older version of the firmware to go back where it was, but this didn't work. Neither did a reinstallation of the backup software. Eventually, a couple of months later, I had to reinstall Windows and the Plextor drive again worked with the backup software - even with the firmware update. I think that there was a registry entry that was causing the problem. AFAIK, the above fixes bad registry entries - however I was not aware of it at the time to give it a try with my problem.