Using Win XP.
My cd/dvd drive won't open a disc when I put it in. I get the message: Drive D is not accessible.
Disc structure is corrupted and unreadable.
Did a web search and it points to a bad hard drive, but it's barely a year old.
Any help appreciated.

If its a desktop cd/dvd drive there should be a small hole in the front panel that you can stick a pin or part of a paper clip in to manually eject the disc. The hole is usally near the eject button. Note that if your computer has a trim door that is part of the computer cabinet you might have to open that first to see the front panel of the drive to get at the eject hole

Any disk or that one particular disk? Because that message says that particular disk is unreadable.

Sorry that you misunderstood me. Disc's go in and out without a problem. I just can't open the disc to play a game or download a game. That's when I get the above mentioned error message.

It sounds like you've already tried several disks with the same result, right? Are you trying with program disks or have you tried a music disk to see if it will work? The things I've found that refer to a possible problem with a hard drive was when the error referred to a hard drive. Your error is referring to your optical (DVD) drive.

You might try going to your device manager and see if there are any alerts for your drive there... yellow exclamation marks.

Should you need to replace it, they are fairly cheap and very easy to install.

With Windows 98, you'd start by removing the drive through Device Manager, then rebooting the computer to let Windows re-detect the drive. I don't know how successful this procedure is with XP though. It only helps if there's a software problem. If the drive has gone bad, you have to replace the drive.

I've tried everything I can think of; uninstalled and let it reinstall but D still wouldn't open anything; tried 3 different discs. Sometimes My Computer shows drive D and then it disappears. I've run antivirus, malwarebytes, disk cleanup, quick and full chkdsk. Restarted just a bit ago and received boot error 116 since once again D was gone, but now it's back. (Had no idea what to check in bios)

Do you know what interface your old CD drive is? This is just a "for instance" sale at Newegg for a SATA CD/DVD drive with a 90% 4 and 5 egg rating.

ASUS DVD Burner

If there is a specific driver for that drive it could be corrupt. Have you tried updating drivers for that drive?

That's definitely a possibility. Depending on the drive, most of them are plug and play though.

I did do a driver update, but said the drive was okay as well as "there is no problem with this drive.
I'll plan on taking it in to the shop tomorrow; the owner gets all his parts from Newegg. Will probably be off line until sometime next week so will stock up on chocolate. lol

Thanks for all the help and suggestions but really beginning to think it needs a new player.

Yup. That's what it looks like.
Only other thing I can think of is if a cable worked its way loose.

An update: turned out the internal power cord was going "bad" and had to be replaced.

Thanks to all for your help/suggestions.

Sounds like it was an easy fix!

Can't believe the new player still won't work. My Computer shows it as E drive whereas it was D. Don't know if this makes a difference or not. Hesitating uninstalling, restarting the pc and let the add hardware re-install it again or maybe wait till Tues. and take it back in again.
Any suggestions, please?

This may be way off but a person with a similar problem discovered it was a "permission" problem.Somewhere there was a box checked that did NOT allow sharing.Have you checked any boxes lately or had a virus? A virus will check all kinds of unwanted boxes. Try doing a restore to a time when things were ok.Jenny may know where all these permission type boxes are.

I'm a little confused. I thought you said the problem was the bad cable.


The drive should work. But if you have any games that you installed while the drive was labelled D:, the games may not recognize the CD in the E: drive. You should be able to change the drive letter back to D: in Device Manager if you want to. You might have to delete the drive that is currently using D: to free up the D: drive letter.

Hi Jenny; sorry I didn't explain fully. The player was bad so he replaced that but the cable was causing windows and programs to freeze then start again, which was the cable.
He had deleted most of my games so I was trying to reinstall them which was per D drive.

How do I change the E to D?

Geo, no virus or malware. Did uncheck a box that allowed something internet file sharing; allowing others to access my pc.

Here's a how-to from Microsoft -

Change, add, or remove a drive letter

It's easier to find if you select "View by" small icons from the Control Panel.

Here's a pictorial version:
http://johnlamansky.com/tech/change-drive-letter/

Thanks; managed to change the drive to D but still no luck.
Need to go into town Tues. so will take the pc back in.

It wasn't very nice of him to delete your games without asking. I wonder if he didn't delete them properly. Maybe Revo Uninstaller or Ccleaner would help.

He had said something about needing to reinstall parts of windows but then I thought he didn't have to. He did mention the games would probably be deleted and that didn't bother me. It was losing most of my bookmarks and most importantly all my saved emails and email addresses.
Have learned the hard way to back up everything to a cd or hard copy.

Something tells me this guy reinstalled your Windows OS. I've found this with lazy techs over and over. Replacing a simply piece of hardware - your DVD drive - should have had nothing whatsoever to do with your OS or games or programs at all. I can't tell you how many optical (CD or DVD) drives I've replaced and I've never had to mess with anything like that.

He may very well have reinstalled Windows if he found that simply replacing the DVD drive and the cable didn't solve the problem accessing the drive. If he thought the connectivity problem was in software -- he may have reinstalled Windows to try to get rid of any software problem.

Now I'm wondering if the problem isn't with the connection on the motherboard rather than with the drive or the cable. If this is a SATA drive, you may have extra SATA connections on the motherboard that you can try plugging it into.