Help Broken Laptop

I am takinng classes on computers and I love to tare into things. I am pretty habdy with my hands and do lots of differnts hand crafts..

I have a Toshiba Laptop a littleover a year old and I am having problems with the DVD Burner. THe system recognizes the drive and states the drive is working properly. I have tried to unstall the drive and the driver and it still doesn't work.

If you try to view information or burn information the drive will open and say insert a disk. You insert a disk and it does not show a disk in the the drive.

IF you go to My Computer it shows no disk in drive.

PLease can somone help me?

The best thing is to go to your laptop vendor. Don't handle hardware things yourself. I had a similar problem and it turned out that I pushed back the drive holder into the laptop a little too "harshly"... so go to the vendor

Optical drives go bad very frequently. My first guess would be you probably need to replace your DVD-RW drive.

Can you tell us what model of laptop you have? I'd be interested in finding out how 'easy' it would be to replace. Sometimes removing optical drives can be very involved - other times it just a matter of pushing a tab or removing a single screw. It really depends on the model.

Something we can do to verify if you have a hardware problem is to use a bootable CD like a Windows Install CD or Knoppix CD (http://www.knoppix.com/). Pop it in your computer, restart it and bring up your boot select menu (if you give us the model on your laptop, we can tell you how). But, usually, you'll just need to tap the appropriate key a few times while you see the very first screen before the Windows logo (Usually F10, sometimes F8, F12 or possibly other keys). A menu will appear that will let you select a drive to boot from. At this point, you'll want to choose your optical drive (DVD-RW) and if it is working, it will boot up from the CD-ROM you have inserted. This means you have almost certainly have a software issue (Windows problem). If it does nothing, then we can be very sure you have a hardware problem (Drive needs to be replaced or reseated).

before going to the vendor..right click My Computer, select properties. this should open the system properties selection, select hardware, select device manager, select Cd/dvd drives...see if it shows up there..if it does right click and try to update the driver..set your machine to connect to internet to search for drivers..if that doesn't work...go to toshiiba's website and see if maybe they have a driver on the website to download if all of these fail, try to update the driver from origional install cd'd or diskette's whichever your model came with...lacking any luck in that arena..check all connections to the drive, both data and power....I'm assuming that this thing can not read cd's either..some of the laptop models won't even show an optical drive until something is inserted in the drive..so put a known good cd it and see if it shows up then...if you're unable to get any response out of the drive including trying to reboot from a valid XP install diskette..sounds like hardware problems.....I know this sounds like a lot of "messin'' around but It has saved me thousands of dollars in hardware costs..and I agree with all the other guys..tell us exactly what model Toshiba laptop you're messin with..that will help alot as well as how much memory you have installed, and what OS you're running....probably is xp home but can't really tell right now.....good luck