I recently bought an old TP310/315. Everything works fine except the CD drive which is recognized by the OS but won't read or activate CDs. Probably a hardware problem because if won't boot a bootable CD.

I wonder where I can buy a s/h replacement drive. Nothing on E-Bay. I live in Australia.

IBM can supply me with a new one . . . for $AU516!! I paid $AU150 for the machine ! What a joke!

Try reseating the drive, laptops take a lot of bumps and if the pins become misalligned, you'll get the exact situation you have.

Hey, I wish I'd read your reply before I paid $50 for an old laptop with an OK CD-drive, and another $50 to have it installed :-((

But I'll check with my guru - the old one may be good as a future backup. A little bonus was to replace all the keys which had Japanese characters as well as English, with English only ones.

Belated thanks for you help.