Lately ive been having problems with my cd drive. Sometimes it will read discs, but other times it will make scratchy noises and not read the disk. Is my CD drive broken and i need a new one, can i clean/fix it somehow, or does the driver have anything to do with it?
Hmm, sounds like a faulty CD drive to me. There are CD drive cleaning kits available where you get a CD with little brushes on one track. You put it in your CD drive, and just listen to it like you would an Audio CD. It will tell you to switch to a certain track to clean the laser lens.
Cheers!
Kirupa 
Thats genius. I never knew those did that, but anyways, I had the same problem with my CD-ROM drive a while back, but it’s been replaced.
I found an old cd, but theres a corner where the piece is just broken somehow. So I taped it Stupid Max and shoved it in the CD-ROM drive. It actually read the CD, so I started to copy the content on to the HD just for safety, then the CD drive went nuts as the CD shattered inside. The blue screen of death came up, and froze the computer. I tried the eject button on the CD-ROM drive, no response, so I had to shut the computer down, manually push out the tray, found about 1/5 of the CD still on the tray, but the other 4/5 is inside, it took me a couple days to shake most of the stuff out and pieced them together to find out what else is lodged inside. After most of the pieces where out, the it refuses to burn anymore, all the burned CDs came out blank, but it still could read fine, but then theres a piece lodged in there so if I put in a CD, it’ll make a circular scratch on the back of the CD when it comes back out. So, it was replaced.
Thats my story, check if you have any stuff lodged inside like mine.
=)
thanks for the info on the cleaner cd, but i dont think thats gonna help me, cause its not the laser thats the problem, its the track that the laser moves on. Since i cant find the recipt it looks like im gonna have to pay for a new cd reader, ho hum…
