Is my CD drive shot?

[thole]

Hi there all,

I'm new here and have been learning a lot off here in the last week or so.

I recently acquired a Thinkpad a22m off Craigslist. I thought I had a good deal, but being new to buying laptops, I forgot to verify that the CD drive works. It was a dumb mistake. It had a 1.0g processor, 256k ram and a 30g hd for $140 (do you guys think thats a decent deal?).

The drive spins and the files show up in windows (I was using xp home) but when I go to access the data, such as trying to play a song, windows says that it cannot access the data.

I checked the drivers, and windows says the drive is working, but i was wondering if the problem could be in the hardware despite windows saying it works? Could it be that the hardware is still recognized but maybe the laser isn't reading properly?

I was just curious what other people's experiences were, just so I dont order a new one off ebay and run into the same issue.

[rkawakami]

Welcome to thinkpads.com!

You can download a trial copy of DVDInfoPro from http://www.dvdinfopro.com/ and run the CRC test to see if your drive can read each sector from the CD. Ideally you should use a data disc which is totally full. I make my own by simply writing a bunch of files on a CDR or CDRW. Also, DVDInfoPro should tell you what the capabilities of the drive are (i.e., which disk formats it can read and write).

You can also download PC Doctor from IBM's site:

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... IGR-4JRMNE

and run the CD/DVD tests, again using a fully written disc.

[sjthinkpader]

... It had a 1.0g processor, 256k ram and a 30g hd for $140 (do you guys think thats a decent deal?). ...

The A22m and A22p are very robust machines. The 2628-Sxx models have 15 inch SXGA+ screen and really quite nice. Just get 512MB RAM, keep the disk clean and defragmented and it will be a reasonable machine to use. Buy a USB2.0 PCMCIA card and you will be set.

[thole]

Thanks for the replys everyone!
I ran the PC Doctor, and it failed all sections of the cd/dvd drive test. I assumed it was shot, and went to my local pc recycler who sold me a hitachi brand dvd drive for 25 bucks. Popped it in, and it worked like a charm.
Thanks again!