cd-rom problem

We allways replace the cd rom drive. There are reasonable in price and I know of no one that does major repair on them. Hopes this helps Frank

You might try cleaning it, but probably have to replace the drive.

How mechanically skilled are you?

At the cost of CD drives, it is far cheaper to replace the drive rather than try to repair it.
Even then, if you need to replace ANY parts to fix the drive, you likely will not be able to find them.

You can attempt to clean the laser lens on the drive. (ONLY or CD-ROM drives, NOT on CD-RW drives)

The tray problem is likely a stuck or stripped gear in the tray drive.
Sometimes, you can clean the gear teeth, or replace a drive belt to fix a tray drive problem.

Still, I only open up drives out of curiosity. It just is not worth my time to attempt to repair a bad drive.

Chas

CD-ROM drives are fairly reliable animals. They are also cheap so not worth repairing. Is you cd drive the original drive and been with the computer 2 years or more? If it is less than a year old then you may want to look into some basic trouble resolution things first. Reseat all cables to the drive particularly the power cable. Clean the head with a special cleaning disk. Try using "EJECT" command (right click the CD and click EJECT) does always open then? You may have an intermittent switch. Also do basic things like an updated virus scan. Part of the problem is we sometimes manually close the CD drawer a little too forcefully too often and may cause some misallignment or wear on the gears of the assembly mechanics, which in turn may also cause occasional misreads (cd not lined up under the optics accurately) The two may problems may be related. In the long run, if it is an older drive over 2 years, you may want to replace it.