DVDR drive not working or showing in Windows?

Draeger

Draeger

Draeger

Soldato
Joined
4 Feb 2004
Posts
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Location
Écosse
Hi,

I've got a Panasonic Toughbook CF-73 here that belongs to a friend. His wife got it from her work and initially it was locking us out as it asked for a BIOS password upon starting. I eventually got round that by taking it apart and removing the CMOS battery and leaving overnight. That did the trick and it reset the BIOS allowing me to install a fresh OS on it.

I installed Win 7 Home Premium on it as we were curious as to how it would run. Anyway it installed fine but there are loads of things now missing from the device manager. Wireless wont work, no sound etc. Checked Panasonic website and the only drivers available are for Windows XP and 2000. So will need to remove Win 7.

Anyway, that aside, the DVDR drive has power to it, accepts and ejects discs fine and the busy light comes on ok. But it wont do anything once a disc is inserted i.e. read it. I had to install Win 7 via a USB stick. There is no optical drive showing in device manager and the BIOS doesn't show an optical drive either. Upon consulting my m8, he said the drive didn't appear to work previous to him giving me at to take a look at so I'm pretty sure I haven't disturbed anything when taking it apart to get at the CMOS battery.

Any thoughts chaps?. :confused:
 
You could try reseating the drive, they can come a drift by even a fraction of mm and it will cause it to not detect, if that doesnt work then possibly the drive or the motherboard is screwed.
 
Further looking into this and it would seem these have a seperate connector between the drive and the motherboard, that could also be at fault. try reseating that, you're probably going to have to strip it to some degree for this though, or just try a new drive first is the easiest DIY option.
 
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