Originally Posted by Dan Penny

Is this machine a laptop or a desktop computer. (I see you have batteries listed in Device Manager, plus you mentioned "silver coils", of which there is nothing like this on a large bay desktop CDROM drive.) (See picture)

ah yes!! i did not think of this!!

sorry, i have a laptop computer

After looking back to your post # 15, I see there is no floppy drive. ~AND~, there is no optical drive(s) listed either. If you've tried all the other suggestions and there is no positive results thus far, I think your CDROM drive may indeed be cooked.

The only other suggestion I have at this point with the supplied information is to try a CDROM cleaner disc. However, given the CDROM logics haven't been picked up by the system, I wouldn't hold much hope in this either.