Laptop CD drive intermittent reads discs

My Laptop CD Drive is playing up. Sometimes it reads discs sometimes it doesnt. At the moment it is not reading any discs. I have tried cleaning the lens with alchohol and a qtip then it will work for a couple of discs and stop.

Cleaning the lens again doesnt help and it just wont read a disc.

There is a replacement drive on ebay for my laptop but its expensive and it looks like a pain to change.

Anyone got any ideas whats wrong with my current cd drive?

It could be a mechanical problem, e.g. the head actuator sticking or the motor not getting up to speed. It could also be the ribbon cable that connects the read/write head to the drive electronics. You could try running Microsoft Fixit and see if that detects any problems. Hardware errors ought to be recorded in the Windows syslogs, but I'm not sure where.

Should have said when I insert a disc it spins a couple of times but doesnt get up to full speed and I cant boot from it. I have tried a boot manager and it just says no media. The BIOS sees it as cdrom but it looks like its just not detecting discs.

How does the drive detect media?

And as if by magic its started working again, can read discs and boot from cds I have created. weird, wonder if it is heat related as today was pretty warm and sunshiny, now the sun has gone down its cooling off.

It sounds like either the motor is duff or it's not getting enough power. Are you running off the battery or mains?

The drive will try to read the innermost track on the CD. If it can't do that, you get "no media". TBH, I'm not sure if it's the drive that does that or the Windows drivers. The result is the same, however.

You could always use an external drive instead of replacing the built-in drive.

Time to open the case and get rid of the fluff?

Its pretty clean in there as I have just been in to put a new IDE hard drive. Its running on mains but at 20v, its a universal power supply where you set the voltage as the original blew up. I could set to 22v as was the original wonder if that is the problem. Battery is toast as the machine is from 1998.

If it is temperature-related, then it's probably a faulty power regulator on the main-board, so replacing the drive will have no effect.

You could always do a network share from another machine if that's convenient.

I wonder if the new hard drive is drawing more current than the old one. The CD motor and the hard drive both run off the 12V rail. There may simply not be enough juice to power both. I wouldn't have thought that upping the PSU output would make any difference but it's worth a try.

Edit: For that matter, so does the cooling fan... and the display. If you disconnect the display, everything should be fine.

Edited by deleted (Wed 20-Apr-16 20:02:32)

There is an atapi timeout error in the event log I will try upping the voltage to 22v.