Dell Studio 1537 CD/DVD Drive No Longer Reading Discs

Hi,

At the moment, my Dell Studio 1537 laptop will not recognize any discs since I rebooted the laptop after it had crashed. After I rebooted the computer and tried to play The Sims 2, which I installed the day before the crash occurred, no AutoRun popped up like it usually would, and the Sims 2 was not recognized under the DVD RW Drive in the Computer folder.

I tried 2 other discs to make sure it wasn't the cd itself. One was a dvd, another was a music cd and both of the discs were also not being recognized.

I also don't get any error when I put a disc in, the computer just won't read it and instead, it makes a loud humming noise, pause, and then it would make one more, but you wouldn't hear any more noise (It makes a loud humming noise once, and then you can hear the disc running)

Dell Diagnostics said everything was working correctly, the DVD/CD drive was listed under the Device Manager, and I ran Norton to find any viruses that may of had conflicted with the drive, but there were not viruses that could of had affected the drive, just a few tracking cookies.

Methods I have tried to solve the issue have failed. I tried System Restore, Mr. Fix It, uninstalling and reinstalling the drive, and I looked under the Registry folder where the Upper and Lower files were suppose to be deleted, but there were no files with that name in there.

Mr.Fix did tell me that the DVDs/CDs I was using may of had not been the right format for the drive, and iTunes even had a message pop up saying:

"Warning!

The registry settings used by the drivers for importing and burning CDs and DVDs are missing. This can happen as a result of installing other CD burning software. Please reinstall iTunes"

I would also like to note that I have no installed any CD burning software. Just the Sims 2, but it was running just fine the day before the crash occurred.

Please help, because I would really like to know if someone can help me solve this before I actually go and have the driver looked at in the case where it could be a hardware problem (I am lacking a good amount of computers skills, so I am not taking a chance to look at it myself )