My CD Drive Won't Boot, Why?

CD drives that won't boot or devices that become inaccessible for no apparent reason is a common problem with laptops. There's obviously always a reason but why can vary significantly.

General hardware failure is often the cause but determining which piece of hardware it is isn’t always so black and white. A common misconception is that if your CD ROM is not recognized by your system that it's simply the CD ROM which is faulty, this isn’t always the case as laptops have fixed or board mounted connectors for these types of devices which include CD ROMs, modems, wifi cards, RAM or even the CPU.

These connectors often have fuses attached that can fail causing the hardware attached to them to lose connection from the system altogether as the connector is now dead. The device itself is in a lot of cases fine but often replaced unnecessarily.

In the situation of the connector itself being faulty you may have to replace the mainboard, a much bigger and more expensive problem to solve.

This issue can be identified by devices suddenly not being recognized by the bios, the next step to determine why your CD drive won't boot is to access your bios to fault find further. Refer to your laptop's user manual for instructions on how to do this.

Once you have accessed the bios on your machine you need to navigate through the various options to be able to view what devices the system actually recognizes as connected or active.

Normally you will find this information under the Devices menu in most bios types. You would do this to determine whether it's an issue with the systems hardware or software, if the bios recognizes that a CD ROM is present and active then you can assume you have a software issue with Windows, possibly a device conflict or driver problem.

This info doesn't cover all possible causes for why a CD drive won't boot but it's a good place to start, so often we hear from users 'I cannot boot my CD drive' so hopefully the info above will point them in the right direction.