How to troubleshoot “The device is not ready.” error in Windows XP

Question

No matter what disc I put in the DVD-ROM drive, I get:

C:\>d:
The device is not ready.

When I put in the disc, it spins up and you can hear it reading the disc. I've tried a couple different discs so I doubt all of them are bad. In the Device Manager, I can see the DVD-ROM driver and it says the device is working properly, and there aren't any updated drivers.

What would be the next steps in determining the root cause of this problem (short of replacing the hardware completely)?

Answer 1

• Try another OS (like a Linux LiveCD).
• Try the drive in another computer.
• Try a new drive.

Often the laser in optical drives will become damaged or malfunction, causing the drive to appear and sound like it's working, but it can't actually read anything from the disks.

Optical drives break, often. The good news is, unless it's some weird OEM one, it will be a cheap part to replace.

Answer 2

Figured it out!

There was actually two CD-ROM drivers on this computer. One called ALIHSJ 6NSDI351MN05 SCSI CdRom Device, which is mapped to D: and actually appears to be totally bogus. Though if I remove it, Windows just puts it right back in. Then there's hp DVD-ROM TS-H353C which appears to be for the actual physical drive in the computer. This for some silly reason gets mounted as Z:. I probably would have figured this out myself, but the My Computer link has been disabled, probably due to some insane domain policy.

Using Z: to access the drive works fine.