CD/DVD drive unresponsive

**williamson389** · March 8th, 2010

My dvd-cd drive on my laptop wont recognize anything. When looking in home-computer- it still shows up but only as cd/dvd drive. theres no information. When checking preferences it shows as unidentified and almost as if it is not there.

I checked in system-administrative-drive utility and the drive shows up as "unknown size" and no other info. on the left where it lists all the drives it shows as hl-dt-st dvdram Gsa-t1on.

The fact that it shows up gives me hope. This is the drive tht came with my ****** Acer 5100 laptop. I have used it but just noticed that it now doesnt work at all.

any ideas?

**williamson389** · May 19th, 2010

Bump

**andru183** · March 11th, 2011

Originally Posted by williamson389

My dvd-cd drive on my laptop wont recognize anything. When looking in home-computer- it still shows up but only as cd/dvd drive. theres no information. When checking preferences it shows as unidentified and almost as if it is not there.

I checked in system-administrative-drive utility and the drive shows up as "unknown size" and no other info. on the left where it lists all the drives it shows as hl-dt-st dvdram Gsa-t1on.

Same thing happening to me, did you ever fix it??

**gordintoronto** · March 11th, 2011

Can you (both) be more specific than, "it now doesn't work at all." If you put a disc (what kind?) in, what appears in Administration/Disk Utility?

This can be a hardware problem. Can you boot from a disc?

**andru183** · March 12th, 2011

Originally Posted by gordintoronto

Can you (both) be more specific than, "it now doesn't work at all." If you put a disc (what kind?) in, what appears in Administration/Disk Utility?

This can be a hardware problem. Can you boot from a disc?

It shows up in Places or in Disk utility, but only ever says CD/DVD drive. If I select the drive in disk utility I get whats shown a in the screenshot which I have attached. My BIOS picks it up, Windows picks it up and is usable in Windows, I can boot a live cd, but once I get to Ubuntu's desktop it does not respond.

In addition, I got a loan of another DVD drive, just booted with it now and it's the same problem. We know for 100% both drives work outside of Ubuntu.

I have tried mounting manual from the command line only for it to tell me there is no drive

I can tell from what I'm typing what has to be done, a reinstall, but with the amount of projects that would have to be moved off the only remaining drive I have, storage would be hard to find so I would like to avoid reinstalling for fear of losing so much work

If you have any suggestions I'd be just too happy to hear them

**gordintoronto** · March 13th, 2011

If it were my computer, I would try different jumper settings (Master, Slave and Cable Select.) No guaranties, it's just the next thing I would try.

You had a disc in the drive when you captured the screenshot?

If you're concerned about losing data with a re-install, you might want to investigate setting up a separate /home partition before your next install.