why don't my dell dimennsion read any of the disc ?

Question

When I insert a disk into my c drive it will not read, why?

Answer 1

To help determine if this is a hardware failure or a software hiccup, take the Windows CD or the Drivers and Utilities CD for the Dimension and put it in the drive. Turn the system off normally. Turn the system back on, when you see the Dell logo start pressing the F12 key, you only need to press it 2 or 3 times. If succesful you should have the boot menu screen, use the arrow keys to highlight the CD or CDRW/DVD drive and press enter. You might get a message on the screen telling you to "Press any Key to Boot From CD" quickly press the enter key. Now the system will boot to the Cd you put in (Windows CD or Drivers and Utilities CD). Either way, you should get the Windows Setup Screen or the Diagnostics Menu. If you don't get either screen and it just boots into Windows, try again to be sure you didn't miss one of the previous keystrokes. If you try again and it still boots to Windows then most likely the drive is bad. If you can boot to the CD's then there is either something wrong with Windows, or a CD buring application installed on your system.

Answer 2

Okay, since the C drive generally means the hard disk, I'm going to assume that you mean the CD drive. Please post back with more details if you meant something else.

One troubleshooting step I'd do right away is to try inserting disks that you **know** are good and see if they work. Also, open up the computer and make sure the power and data cables on all the drives are snugly in place.

Some possibilities, starting with the most obvious:

1) Make sure the disk actually has data on it. If the disk is unformatted, the drive won't read it becasue there's notthing there **to** read.

2) If you're trying to view a DVD, make sure the drive on your computer can read DVDs.

3) The disk may be dirty. Use a CD cleaning cloth (it'll work on DVDs, too) to make sure there's no dust on the disk.

4) The disk may be scratched or have other surface damage which is keeping the drive's laser from reading anything. Take the disk to a video shop and ask them if they can buff it out (it's kind of like re-machining the rotors for disk brakes). They'll know what you mean!

5) The drive may be dirty. Use a CD drive cleaning kit. Again, it should work fine for DVD drives, read the fine print to make sure.

6) If there's still no improvement, and other disks work, you probably have a bad disk.

7) If other disks don't work, and the cable connections are all good, then you probably have a bad drive. Fortunately, they're not nearly as expensive as they used to be.

Hope all that helps. Best of luck.

Answer 3

Right tic on "My Computer" and select "Manage">Disk management>Cd/DVD Drives>tic on it>right tic on each drive and>uninstall>reboot computer.

Answer 4

make sure its being recognized in the bios and hardware manager. update the driver.