How to Troubleshoot a CD-R Drive

Video Transcript

"Hello, my name is Eric White and today we're going to talk about how to troubleshoot a CD-R. Now I'm assuming something bad has happened if you're asking me this question. So A, there's no power and the drawer won't open, B, you can't burn or C, the whole computer won't start up, worst care scenario. So the things to look for first of all are can you eject the CD, can you open the drawer. If the drawer won't open, a lot of times what can happen is an application is holding on to your CD-ROM drive and won't allow you to access it because there's some subroutine somewhere that's crashed and its just not letting you have access to the CD-R. To fix that, all you'd have to do is restart, just reboot your machine. When it comes back up, you should see flashing lights, you should be able to open and close the drawer. When you go into My Computer, you should see the CD drive in your drive list and if all that happens, you're good to go then you can stop here. Now if that doesn't fix the problem, you're going to have to go to just basic troubleshooting, is the CD-R getting power so go ahead and power the machine down, check the plugs, you're going to check the mollusk cable, you're going to check the data cable, what can happen is is time goes on, metal heats up when it heats up and cools down it expands and contracts and plugs can work themselves loose. So just make sure all your plugs on the back of the CD-R are seated. Then power the machine back up, see if you still have power. If its a read error, say you've put your favorite CD in there and it just won't play it, take your CD to another computer and make sure that that CD is OK. Maybe there's something wrong with the CD. That's a good way of ruling out the media and circling back on just the hardware. So to review, you're going to reboot, check your power, check your cable seating, and if all else fails, grab another CD-R, install it, if it works, you know your old CD-R was bad. That's called swapping for a known good. So once you've swapped for a known good and you know that your old one is bad, you've effectively troubleshot your CD-R."