Acer Laptop 1681 no dvd burner

Hi,

I have an ACER 1681 Aspire laptop and it will not recognise the internal DVD burner anymore. When trouble shooting windows message reads " Windows successfully loaded the device driver for this hardware but cannot find the hardware device (code 41)" . I have tried several times to uninstall and find/reinstall the device but each time it comes back with the above message. I do not want to use the acer recovery disk supplied with the laptop as all that is is a ghost image of the original clean install and it will blow everything away. I can not aford the time to reinstall everything on this laptop so would prefer to fix the problem without blowing the HDD.

No it is not a problem with the dvd drive as I took the laptop into the local Acer service agents and they tried the laptop out by changing the HDD and the dvd burner worked fine. So it is not hardware. The service agents know of this problem and from what they have said it appears that it is common to Acer's and they only fix it by using the recovery disk. Probably due to the time it takes to fix windows problems any other way.


Craig

 

No offense craig but if thats the only way the service agents know how to fix the problem, and the problem was fixed; why swim against the current? You can try buying a cheap slim cdrom burner/USB cdrom burner and burn the info you need and then just get on with it.

 

When a service agent tells you they do it that way because they do not have the time to spend on it then I do not consider them true service agents and all they are doing is getting around a problem which they can not be bothered finding a solution for.

Yes as I said it is the DVD burner NOT the HDD. The service agents confirmed that it is a software problem, that they know of but will not spend time trying to find a fix even though from what I have been able to find out is only common to ACER laptops and windows xp, by substituting a test HDD for mine and the dvd burner works fine.

For some unknown reason win xp looses the dvd, or cd if that is what is oin the laptop, and you can not get it back by the usual trouble shooting/fix methods under windows xp.

Here is another one for you. I tried using an external dvd burner, which works fine on 4 other laptops which I tried it on, and it would not recognise that either. But it will recognise external HDD's, memory sticks, mp3 players, digital camera's etc. Everything else except dvd/cd burners. So to me this tends to suggest that there is some type of conflict with windows + acer's + dvd/cd drives.

Yes I can and have copied all the software from the HDD, just incase I have no choice but to blow it away, but this will not help me much as it will take days to reinstall all the software and set it all up again. I can not afford this amount of time both reinstalling and being without the laptop.

 

Heh irony here is through the roof. All laptops are built equally, just diff mfg using diff hardware and some custom software applications. Might be the mobo on that laptop is just a bad build with no real fix for it. Maybe it might go as far as some custom acer software/update tool/whatever causes the conflicts.

Anyways I think its unfruitfull to think that they tech guys are looking for the easyway out, maybe even naive. They get paid by the hour and selling you more crap so they make more money is always a plus; so giving you the FREE option to say "just reinstall WXP" might be the ONLY solution.

 

maybe the problem is in the recover disks? if you were to reinstall just use windows XP not the acer recovery disks

have you uninstalled or installed any CD Burning utilities? you might try this:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;314060

or this:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=320553