I recently acquired a used Satellite 4090xdvd laptop from a friend. The guy has a celeron 400, 192 megs ram, six gig hard drive, xga screen, wireless card(working now
), and an sd-c2102 dvdrom.
Anyways, after installing slackware 10.2 using my last two cdrws I quickly realized that the DVDROM for one reason or another will not read DVDs for the life of it. When I pop a cd in, the drive spins up and reads the disc. On a good day, after inserting a dvd, the activity light will blink, the drive will click, the drive will very noisily try to spin up once or twice, then die. The activity light remains on (As most dvdroms do with dvds if I'm not mistaken) except there is no reading of the dvd. Mount returns that there is no media present, ogle/mplayer/xine all complain about there being no media, and the thing won't even boot from a dvd. Big problem since this was intended to be a media system for longer trips on the planes.
Anyways, here's what I've attempted so far:
Ran a cleaner CD with "cleaning bristles"
Blew the guy out with an air compressor
Used _many_ different brands/formats of dvd-r/dvd+r/commercial dvds.
The drive itself is recognized properly, and like mentioned before, all cds I've popped into it have worked flawlessly. So what I'm wondering now is if this is as hopeless as the laser not firing/tracking or if it's something I could fix with a bit of elbow grease. I'd like to get this drive running as I've already blown enough money on a new battery, especially if it's as simple as disassembling the bay and cleaning a mirror.
Sorry if this isn't completely on-topic for linuxquestions, but everywhere else I've found is totally windows-centered, and I'm speaking a foreign language to those people.
Besides, LQ is the best help forum out there anyways. Thanks for any and all responses in advance.
-vette
