My cd rom drive does not recognize media - Dell Inspiron 8600 Notebook

You hard drive is missing from the system. Or, just does not recognize it. The obvious - Remove any USB devices like drives and any media from disc player. Its trying to load, but can't find bootable hard drive, CD, or USB... Remove the hard drive and reseat (reconnect). Check BIOS by pressing an F key during boot. Look on the screen for correct Function key. Might be F2 key. Verify BIOS recognizes the drive. It must be listed! There is no going forward if it's not. Check boot order and make internal hard drive first. Save and restart.

Probably a failed drive. If Windows recognizes the drive, there really is no reason that any media inserted won't be recognized except bad media or bad drive. Probably the laser is gone or misaligned. There is no fix except to replace the drive.

THEN U NEED A DECODER OR INSTALL A DVD RW..U HAVE ONLY A CD-ROM THERE 4 IT ONLY RECOGNIZES CD'S U CAN C IF YOUR SYSTEM IS ELIGIBLE 4 A DVD PROGRAM BY GOING TO WINDOWS SUPPORT FOR MEDIA OR JUST CLICK ON YOUR MEDIA PLAYER N HIT UPGRADE IF U HAVE MEDIA PLAYER 10 OR LOWER..

A CD-Rom will only recognize CD's. It must be a DVD-ROM to recognize DVD's. DVD-ROM will recognize CD's ,but not the other way around. No drivers needed for thes, they are plug and play.

Char S.

You need to install the DVD decoder that came with the drive such as PowerDVD or WinDVD. If you dont have the disks or setup files for those, you can download a free Windows DVD player program such as VLC Media Player that will work. http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

what do you mean not recognized? not detecting the drive or not reading? if not recognized by windows you can check the driver for drives in the windows if not reading it is the lens problem..if the lens problem, the solution only is to replace the lens or to replace the whole drive

the lens inside the cd rom wil hav to be cleaned
then it wil detect
if the problem still remains then u have to replace the lens inside the cd rom

open your bios setup and check the cd rom is recognized and check the boot priority is set to allow to boot from the cd rom first.

It seems that what you have is a combo drive only :(
it only recognize DVD reading. no matter what driver you used. need to buy a dvd writer/ that said can write dvd.


Types of Optical Drives and CD/DVDs
Optical drive type Read from CD/DVD-ROM media Write to CDRW media Write to DVD ±RW/R media Write to DVD +R DL media Write label to LightScribe CD-RW Write to DVD-RAM media DVD-ROM Drive Yes No No No No No DVD and CD-RW Combo Drive Yes Yes No No No No DVD±RW/R and CD-RW Combo Drive with Double- Layer support Yes Yes Yes Yes No Yes LightScribe DVD±RW/R and CD-RW Combo Drive with Double- Layer support Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Blu-Ray Disc DVD±RW SuperMulti Drive with Double-Layer support Yes Yes* Yes Yes No Yes *Low speed (4X) and high speed (4-12X) are supported. UHS-RW (24X and 32X CD-RW) is not supported.

NOTE: Some of the optical drives listed may not be supported by your computer. The listed drives are not necessarily all of the supported optical drives.

Wow, That's a weird malfunction. Only TDK??? What about other media types? Did you try a diffrent burning software?