[BobFIU]

Lots of people got together to help with this. It looks like the problem may indeed be a bad drive.

[coastie65]

Hi Bob, As a general rule those things do well out of the box with no problems. On rare occasions, the filters wilget installed upon instalation and cause problems that are easily remedied by deleting the filters. I had to replace the one in here. a couple of months ago, due to a laser failure. DVD's worked fine, CD's were dead and wouldn't read. I went through the same drill chasing everything under the sun before finally deciding I would have ot get off my pocketbook and buy a new drive. As you have found out, working these problems are fun at long distance. :D coastie

[AuroraDizon]

Do you have an external hard drive? This doesn't always work but you can install whatever game or program from a cd rom to your external hard drive then plug it into your computer for the time being. Sometimes the programs will run.

[BobFIU]

AuroraDizon,

Actually, we considered buying an enclosure for the DVD drive and making it an external, but he wants it IN the computer!

Thanks!

[AuroraDizon]

No I was referring to installing games into an external hard drive as a temp solution until you get your new drive sorted out.

[BobFIU]

I understand what you meant. We're not interestied in doing that, we're interested in fixing the problem. I'm a little confused as to why you keep mentioning games, since we're not trying to install games, and we're not having a problem with a hard drive, we're having problems with an optical drive.

[AuroraDizon]

I know, I mention games because you said you could run dvds and cd music but nothing else. Mostly other then install discs there are games was just a natural assumption. I was merely offering a temporary fix until you got the new drive installed.

[mphenterprises]

BobFIU said:

I want to REALLY thank everyone who went way out of their way to help with this problem. It is refreshing to see so many people chime in to help someone fix a technical issue such as this. My only hope is that I get to reciprocate in some way in the future.

Hi Bob. I believe I can speak for several, if not the majority, of the PCWorld regular members when I say it is our pleasure to do what we can to help you. We do what we can to answer any questions. What we normally suggest to people is to look around the Community and offer any suggestions or answers that they can.

Since you have this Discussion marked as "Answered," please select the two (2) posts that you feel were "Helpful" and the post that you feel was "Correct."