Hardware Fried

[Ankh-Morpork Guard]

Or at least, it seems to have fried. I was playing Morrowind and the game crashed. Well, the whole computer crashed and the screen went a sketchy and painful looking blue. I wasn't running any other programs and just did a Virus/Adware scan yesterday(both with updated definitions). When I restarted the computer, my CD/DVD-R drive didn't register. Sort of.

It doesn't appear in the My Computer anymore, and any CD placed in the drive doesn't get read(though I can hear it trying to read the thing). However, the device manager says that its working properly and troubleshooting it is pointless. Any idea what could have happened?

If its necessary, here are the computer's specs:

Dell Inspiron 8600 Notebook
1.70GHz
512MB RAM
Service Pack 2 is installed, though its never given me any problems.

 

[Ankh-Morpork Guard]

Its a detachable drive, also...I just removed it and replaced it with the 3 1/2 floppy drive I've got. That is reading just fine. Guess I just answered my own question...seems that the drive did get fried...

 

[TheAuldGrump]

Weird. I had something similar happen a couple of months ago. In my case it appears to have been caused by a faulty update to ITunes of all things. I ended up having to reformat.

Fortunately I had made backups and could get everything, or almost everything back.
Unfortunately one of the things I put back on my system was the same faulty update to ITunes... Which is how I found out what had caused the problem.

So I reformatted again and downloaded a fresh copy of ITunes and everything works now.

The Auld Grump

 

[Ankh-Morpork Guard]

Well, I haven't installed anything new for a while...or updated anything beyond Spyware/Norton Antivirus. I'm currenlty resorting to looking for a replacement part...though it seems that Dell doesn't actively support this baby anymore.