DVD/CD not woprking possible malware

I apologize if this has been covered. I have run into a dead end. This is an Acer M1641 with Vista OS. I bought this computer in Aug. for my nephew.
Around the first of the month the CD/DVD quit working . In device manager it has the yellow exclamation point next to the device. I have done several things and it still does not work. I can kick my self but I didn't do a system restore and now can't go back to a time when it worked.
The drive is a SATA drive. I unplugged and removed the drive from bios and rebooted then shut down added it to the bios again . The machine will recognize the drive but when Vista boots again it is still the same. I replace it with a IDE dvd drive with the same results. I replace the Sata drive with a brand new SATA DVD and still have a non working drive. I then tried to replace the cdrom.sys driver but Vista would not let me. I tried in safe mode and it still would not let me. There is no Admin user and my nephew the only user/ admin can't change any system files . I have run different malware and virus programs and nothing has fixed this problem. They show everything is fine. I am leaning it is a virus or malware infection.

I have a major problem as thepy never made the system restore cds and my nephew really doesn't want to start all over. I will buy the restore DVDs if I have too.
I do realize that we might have to restore the computer but would like to avoid that if possible. What do I do now? any help would be appreciated.