DVD drive playing up. Hardware or Windows?

My laptop dvd-rw drive is suffering from a rather peculiar syndrome, which I have dubbed as 'Non-selective memory'.

The problem is that it currently does not recognise any cd or dvd that is placed in the drive, and believes that there is an 'audio cd' in the drive, containing a single file called 'track00.cda'.

Has anybody else had this problem, and if so, how did you resolve it, as I have checked the 'net, and it seems that alll the suggested solutions that I could find (and understand) have had no effect. This has all occured since I installed (and now uninstalled) Nero 6 so I could do up some compilation disks.

Any help would be appreciated, and will of course earn that person some serious nominations from me for 'Poster of the Month'.

Hey, if bribery works, why waste it!

Have you tried changing the drive's path letter to see if it then still thinks there's a CD inserted?

Or just switch off the PC, disconnect from IDE, reboot without, then connect it right back.

There are so many things to try I guess, but some problems are just weird.

When Nero is installed it adds a number of things to the core parts of Windows that deal with CD/DVD handling. One of these is an aspi abstraction layer (if you don't know that that is look here). Normally only a system with a SCSI drive will have aspi drivers installed as standard. All other systems won't have one so Nero has its own that it runs in software to emulate this abstraction layer so it can communicate properly with the majority of drives.

When you uninstalled Nero it might have messed this up. One possibility could be that it left the Nero driver behind and has confused the OS.

Another cause might be virtual drives. Nero has support for virtual drives when creating content for a disc before burning. If you uninstalled Nero while a virtual drive image was still active this might have got stuck and be causing the issue you now have.

I would suggest trying what DC has already suggested first as these steps will normally trick Windows into reinitialising the drive.