DVD drive won't open normally or recognize discs

[Sweater Fish Deluxe]

Hi,

I have aT42 with WinXP SP3. My problem with time is the Ultrabay CDRW/DVD drive. Pressing the blue button or trying to eject through Explorer both just make the drive light flash seven times (I don't know if that number is significant to anyone), but it doesn't actually open.

If I open it manually by sticking a paper clip in that little hole, then Windows does not recognize that there's a disc in the drive.

It seems to be the same problem this person was having:

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=19141

But uninstalling the driver and rebooting as suggested there does not fix the problem for me.

The first time that this problem appeared (quite suddenly, by the way, the drive worked completely fine up until then), removing and reinserting the drive would sometimes make it start opening normally, but then it would just make some farting noises when trying to read the disc and then fail.

I want to think that this is a bad drive and simply replacing it will fix the problem, but the topic linked above makes me unsure. So I want to get some other opinions before I spend the money on a new drive.

What do you guys think?


...word is bondage...

[Harryc]

We have many members in California including one site Admin (Ray). I'd ask one of them (or a friend) to test it in another machine. Based on the symptoms my gut feeling is that the drive is bad.

[rkawakami]

I'd say that if you can find someone locally (Ukiah is about 150 miles north of me) that has an IBM Thinkpad using the Ultrabay 2000 (T2x, T30, A2x, A3x), then you could try their drive in your system or your drive in their system.