Hello all,

I have an e-machines desktop which I bought last year at Office Depot. The DVD-RW stopped working a few days ago. It swallows the disk and flashes the light for a few seconds, but then does nothing. The hardware profile shows the DVD as "working normally." Windows XP sees it. BIOS also sees the DVD. I checked all the cables - everything is OK. I tried uninstalling it in the device manager and installing it again - to no avail. But the DVD-RW does nothing. Any suggestions? And the warranty has already expired

Thanks!

You've already tried the things I normally suggest, maybe the drive is gone bad. It happens, I had the same problem a few years ago and that was the problem. If you decide thats whats wrong you can get a new one fairly cheap and they install easily.

Maybe your lens is scratched up? I have a DVD drive that whenever I put in a blank DVD it says incorrect function. Does that happen?

Worst case scenario: the drive is shot.
Likley scenario: Worst case scenario.

If you can go to the store and they offer you a drive for more than $40, it's a rip off. If you go to newegg.com the DVD burners there are only about $35 and we could always run you through doing it yourself if you don't trust yourself to do it.

Regards,
TheYoda

No, when I put any disc in, the DVD drive swallows it, flashes the light 3 or 4 times, and then - nothing. When I click on the DVD icon, it shows no contents (regardless of type of disc and whether it's blank or not). If I insert a music CD and run Media player, it says "No disc in drive."

Possibly dust on the lens. You could try one of those lens cleaning CD disk. A few bucks, usually sold by music CD's in the store. That said, I agree with the others
Mark