CDrom Drive not seeing Discs!!!!!!

HELP.....!!!
A couple of days ago whilst playing a game, the PC crashed, (nothing unusual there). Since then my CD Drive isnt seeing a disc...!When I insert a disc into the drive the green display light flickers, and the HDD light flickers, I can also hear the CD attempting to spin, however, the HDD isnt powering up, If I click on the D drive Icon the message 'D: unaccessable, not ready....'....etc appears, in other words the drive isnt seeing a disc. I have uninstalled and re installed the CDROM via the 'Device Manager' menu, and tried yet the report is saying the the 'device is working properly'.....most fustrating.......as I cant load any cd's. The cdrom is a ATAPI/E-IDE CD-54S (54x, manafacturer is CTX, and uses the standard Win98 cdrom device driver.
Please please help, as the last resort is reformatting disc, any suggestions are urgently required...............TQ

:mad:

Try cleaning the CD Rom with a CD/DVD cleaner. If that dosen't do the trick try replaceing it. The Laser may have quit working properly.

first thing to do is try the drive from DOS

use a bootable floppy with CD-ROM Support
http://www.bootdisk.com

if it works try to disable DMA for your CD-ROM..

also run SFC.EXE and checl for corrupted files (CDFS.VXD should be #1 on your list to restore..)

Hope it helps

First try it in DOS, if it works, then the problem is in the Win. If don't works, here is a tip i use it myself: Put two (2) CDs in the drive ;) , maybe the laser is too weak and it can not read the disk. If this won't work replace it.