Suddenly it seems my cd-rw drive died. It started one day when trying to burn a cd. It had been working fine for the last year using Adaptec EZ cd creator. I started getting errors, but now the drive will not recognize a cd of any type. I open My Computer and double click E:, and it says "insert a disk". The drive does spin and make some noise first. There are no errors showing in the Device Manager and it says that the device drivers are ok. It's an Acer 10x4x32; the model is CDRW1032A. The rest of my system is: Win ME AMD athlon K7 1.3 Asus A7V133 board maxtor 30 gig ata100 sys drive, Maxtor 40 gig ata200 D: 512 PC133 corsair ram Maudio AP2496 soundcard SBlive Py 5.1 card Riva TNT video card What can I do to find out if the drive is shot or if there's another problem? No idea what to do. Thank you! Pete

test in a different machine

test in a different machine change ide leads

hello to see if its a window or hard ware problem, reboot with m.e bootdisk in drive. put a data cd in cd drive. and at the a:dir e: /p click enter. if you get a directory for the cd than its a windoz problem.if nothing try diferant drive letters same commad as e might not be your cd-rw drive its just an example. if no directory. than try cleaning the laser lens.and check out loose ide cables and make sure jumpers have not fallen off ect.and check power plug.

Thanks. I have no other computer to test the drive in. But I did boot up to my Win ME emergency boot disk, selected "start with CD support". It started to load a driver, but then said, "no drive installed" and aborted driver installation. After it completed boot up, it gave a message saying something like "the CD drive may not be installed properly...check connections and restart". I haven't tried that yet. I will try to check the power and IDE connections tonight. thanks, Pete

Well, the other guys gave great advice,however lets go back to this. Take the drive out and give a a good shake (the gears may be in a bind) also use the emergency eject hole to eject the tray and use some compressed air to spray inside. Be careful since the compressed air in liquid form can ruin your drive. Finally if you have another cd drive hooked up along with this drive take it out and let the CDRW be the only drive and try to boot with it. If all fails ask your kid if they stuck french fries inside the drive or popped a penny into it. Good Luck Phantom

I checked for loose IDE cable, swapped cables, and also tried plugging into a different IDE port on the mother board. I checked that the power connection was ok. Still, when I boot to my emergency floppy and select "start with CD rom support", I get an error that says "no drive found". After boot up it says to check if the cd drive is installed properly. I did not try to clean the laser. Could that be the problem? I wouldn't think so if it doesn't recognize the drive. I think the drive is dead. Anything else I can try? thanks