Question

IBM thinkpad R40 will not detect CD Drive

Asked by: Topiltzin

I've got a Thinkpad R40 that a client sent to me to fix.  Replacing the keyboard was the easy part, but the Ultrabay doesn't want to identify any IDE devices.  It happily recognizes the floppy drive when inserted.  The CD and DVD drives have been tested in another Thinkpad and work perfectly.  Also, when a drive is inserted into this machine, it spins up, the green light comes on, the eject button works fine, just no sign that the system knows it's there.  Laptop is running Windows XP Pro.  I've tried pressing F12 and the CD drive comes up in the list of bootable devices, but if I put a bootable CD in the drive and select it from the list, it just skips to the next available boot device.  The BIOS has some test tools for troubleshooting and diagnostics and when I run the tool that scans the primary and secondary IDE controllers, it only detects the hard drive and shows everything else as "empty".

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Asked On
2009-03-30 at 12:50:09ID24278675
Topics

X-Windows Window Manager

,

General Laptop

,

DVD Players & Recorders

Participating Experts
2
Points
500
Comments
2

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Answers

 

by: anvansterPosted on 2009-03-30 at 12:58:51ID: 24022693

I can suggest reset bios to default, if it doe not helps, try updating it (if you can do it with floppy)
Have you tried some other OSes like Knoppix, not windows. Or Puppy Linix.

 

by: David-HowardPosted on 2009-03-30 at 13:49:16ID: 24023189

Go to Lenovo's web site and update the drivers for this system. I run across this quite a bit. I normally have success by updating one of the following.
Motherboard driver
CD-DVD driver
BIOS
I've also had a lot of success by updating the Trusted Platform Management driver.
You might be able to circumvent all of this though by downloading and running the System Update Utility. It searches for drivers that your system is behind on.
I went to Lenovo's site and your system is listed. However, I do know the model number (R40 or R40e, etc.) so cannot give you the specific driver link.
This link is for an R40 (minus your particular model number).
However, you can get a good idea of the drivers that I am speaking about.
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/product.do?template=/product.do?template=%2Fproductpage%2Flandingpages%2FproductPageLandingPage.vm&sitestyle=lenovo&brandind=10&familyind=113090&machineind=0&modelind=0&partnumberind=0&subcategoryind=0&doctypeind=9&doccategoryind=0&operatingsystemind=53385&validate=true
Specifically on the the link above, scroll down to  System Update 3.14   2008-10-28
Once this utility is installed you can launch it and Lenovo will provide a list of needed drivers, etc.

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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