Greetings,
Having a problem with my ATAPI CDRW 52x32X52 drive. The CDRW has a hard time recognizing any music or mixed content disks. I'll put in a CD and the light will blink for a minute or two, then shuts off. I'll re-insert the CD several times before the drive recognizes the disk. It will not auto play any disk. I have to manually open the folder. I have gone into the drive's properties to change this to no avail.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, and I thank you in advance.
Cheers,

What model, how old. It could just be that it's dead/dying. With DVD±RW drives so cheap, you may as well invest in something newer.

The CDRW came with the the computer I bought, just over a year ago.
I have a pentium 4, 2.7 ghz. I'll have to take the case off to look for the model.

Maybe not. If you're running XP, right-click My Computer, click the Hardware Tab, click on Device Manager, Double-Click DVD/CD-Rom drives. It will show your make/model of drive. If there is an exclamation mark or questions mark next to it, there could be driver and or hardware issues.

Seems a lense problem... have you tried to clean the lasr lenses?

Thanks for all your posts. I went out and bought a CD disc cleaner. My CDROM works like a charm now.
Cheers everyone,
big_lar

Believe it or not, this could simply be a firmware update.

My relatively new multi-format (CDRW/DVDRW/DL/lightscribe) drive would occasionally not recognize disks in the drive. When I searched the net I found lots of people had similar problems.

Further searching at the manufacturer turned up firmware updates, which so far (knock on wood) seem to have cleared up the problem.

If you find firmware updates for your drive, I recommend you reboot to a clean boot before applying them.

I think the manufacturers are rushing the products out the doors and letting us do the final testing on them.

FIRMWARE DOES NOT JUST STOP WORKING ALL OF A SUDDEN.