optical drive not working

ok the optical drive on my laptop hasnt worked for about a year now... in the beginning it went out and i used the upper and lower filters fix and it worked. then it went away again and it still hasn't shown back up. it doesn't show in bios or disk management or anything. im not really sure how much else i can do to fix it but any suggestions can't hurt. btw this laptop is out of warranty.

Update... ok i guess that i can't get any of these threads in the right place lol. just wanted to let you know of other things ive tried. i tried using a different disc drive and it didn't work. also tried taking out putting back in and searching for hardware change. nothing. i do get power to the disc drive i can open and close it. when i put a cd it does spin and act like its gonna read it but nothing happens. i've done everything short of sending it back in for repair.

bumping my own stuff i guess.

In my experience, if the device doesn't show up in the BIOS, it's "dead" and needs to be replaced. Fortunately, you can buy these things on eBay and they are not expensive. I just bought a few DVD RW drive for our old Dell laptops and I paid $15 for them! They were new and had never been used... Good luck!

no thats not gonna work cause ive tried a different drive and its still not showing up.... i have no clue what the issue is. and i know the other drive worked.

Just fyi, my sister has an Acer laptop on which the optical drive was not working nor appearing in Windows Explorer or Disk Management. Took it to local pc shop which, after assessing drive itself was ok, fixed it with adjustments to the Registry. All well now. Working fine.
Pedro

ok so here's what i've done so far. i have tried a diferent drive. i have tried the different registry fixes out there. i ordered a new flatwire cable hoping that'd be it. of course it wasn't. im at my wit's end. i really don't want to have to buy a new external drive but its looking more and more like thats what im going to have to do. unless someone here gives me a magical fix i haven't tried yet im about done.