Toshiba DVD-ROM in Presario Notebook?

Greetings Fellow Geeks,

I am not sure WHERE this should be posted, but I "suspect" it's in this forum...

My brother is visiting me and brought his Compaq Presario laptop to see if I could fix the DVD-ROM. (I can clean it with my CyberClean CD, the computer can see it, but when I attempt to open it & use it, I get an error telling me that drive E is not accessible; the device is not ready.") He HAS used it before, it is a legacy drive, and I tried removing it from the device manager. It was re-installed upon reboot, but will not read any other medium. (I've tried several.) My only chance would be to find the correct driver, download to floppy, and install on his laptop, right? I have searched everywhere, including this forum and Kodo's suggested driver page, but I could have overlooked something.

Any ideas? The specs follow.

My heart felt thank you,

Gina

Specs on laptop:
Compaq Presario 12XL125
Lucent 56K V.90 PCI DF modem
Windows 98 SE
AMD-K6(tm)- Pentium 3 Processor
Toshiba DVD-ROM SD-C2302

 

You might look for a firmware update, too.

What's firmware? It's what the drivers talk to:
Application <--> Driver <--> Firmware <--> Media

It also might be a dead drive, as sad as that is. Most mechanical products have a 10,000 hour mean time before failure. So if the drive is more than two years old in a machine that is mostly always on, it might have worn out through use. --- Although a quick Google says it has a 60,000 hr MTBF.

Do you have the most updated chipset drivers installed?
Have you tried enabling/disabling DMA on that drive?
Are you trying to use media burned with a UDF packet writed (InCD or DirectCD)?

 

New info

da chicken,
Thank you-- good info! I just found out from my brother that, even though this laptop is a few years old, he's never used it! He's not much of a "computer person," I am the only member of my family who is interested in anything beyond email or making CD's. Also, he just told me that he bought it used. (He tried to use it for the first time a few weeks ago to watch a DVD.) Certainly Compaq (now HP?) has released updates and chipset drivers, correct? Do you have any ideas on where I might go to find them? (I've looked...)

I looked through the software he brought with him and found what appear to be 2 Quick Restore disks. The DVD-ROM will read these! He has nothing stored on this laptop, so I may as well try, no? Do you have any further advice for me?? (This laptop has never seen internet either. So updates WOULD be in oder, I think.)

Ok, I feel foolish, but how do I do that? Any advice given would be most appreciated.

Thank You,
Gina

PS: Update: I saw no harm in running the restore, but after the first disc, I got an error: "Cannot unlock a locked drive." Now, the machine cannot find the operating system at all! I am now attempting to reformat, because I think he bought a load of trash along with this laptop... ANY advice would be greatly appreciated. This has turned into a "Software" issue, right?

 

What model of notebook is it?

 

"Compaq Presario 12XL125 "

as for updates, try HP's/Compaq's site, search by the model number

 

Oops - my bad