Mt_GoatHead Cheezy KnobPflugerville (north of Austin)Icrontian
edited April 2009
How old is the CD drive and what brand is it? It likely just died. Can you hear it spin up when you put a disc in and close the tray? If so, you can try moving the IDE or SATA cable to another header on the motherboard.
Hmmm, A bit difficult to troubleshoot an optical drive for a hardware problem. Ultimately any fix is less than likely to be cost effective when compared to a replacement. It spins up though? So if it spins up, its getting power, and it would seem that its drive mechanism is okay, so perhaps its just not reading the disk at that point? You could get one of those lens cleaning disks with the brushes built on a cd, but in my experience that's a crap shoot at best, rarely seems to work. If you can pick one up realy cheap, its worth a shot, but if your going to spend half the cost of a new drive on a lens cleaner, I can't advise doing it.
If its my money, I would not overspend on an internal drive replacement for an aging laptop like the Inspiron 9200. Ultimately when windows 7 is out next year, your going to want to upgrade your portable anyway, why overspend on an internal solution that might not fit you next portable?
If you need a replacement I would urge getting an external drive to use over USB 2.0. Why, you ask? Becasue its going to have some utility as an investment beyond this current laptop, and frankly, the external drives are actualy priced better from what I can tell. Take it, use it on any future system, a little netbook, an ultraportable without a drive, a future desktop with a drive failure.
Comments
Hmmm, A bit difficult to troubleshoot an optical drive for a hardware problem. Ultimately any fix is less than likely to be cost effective when compared to a replacement. It spins up though? So if it spins up, its getting power, and it would seem that its drive mechanism is okay, so perhaps its just not reading the disk at that point? You could get one of those lens cleaning disks with the brushes built on a cd, but in my experience that's a crap shoot at best, rarely seems to work. If you can pick one up realy cheap, its worth a shot, but if your going to spend half the cost of a new drive on a lens cleaner, I can't advise doing it.
If its my money, I would not overspend on an internal drive replacement for an aging laptop like the Inspiron 9200. Ultimately when windows 7 is out next year, your going to want to upgrade your portable anyway, why overspend on an internal solution that might not fit you next portable?
If you need a replacement I would urge getting an external drive to use over USB 2.0. Why, you ask? Becasue its going to have some utility as an investment beyond this current laptop, and frankly, the external drives are actualy priced better from what I can tell. Take it, use it on any future system, a little netbook, an ultraportable without a drive, a future desktop with a drive failure.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827106284
If that doesn't work, your drive is toast.