A mail-order house called Tenex (800-776-6781) has an internal CD-ROM player (it fits in a disk drive bay inside your computer) for $199 and an external model that looks exactly like the DAK for $289.

Your computer should restart automatically. Make sure your CD or USB drive is in your computer. If you’re prompted to “Press any key to boot from external device,” do so.

Windows doesn’t recognize DVD or can't find DVD/CD drive? If your CD/DVD drive is not detected, showing, reading, working, or will not read/write media on Windows PC, then see this.

If your computer did not come with a recovery CD, Windows 7 allows you to create one with a blank CD or DVD. Create a System Repair Disc Insert a blank CD or DVD into your computer's disc drive.

Insert the CD into the computer's CD drive. Restart your computer. Watch the top of the screen for a message that says "F2 = Setup, F12 = Boot Menu." Press "F12" when you see this message.

QUESTION: My computer does not recognize my CD drive. It stopped doing this so I thought the CD player was just shot. I put in a new one and got the same result. I switched IDE cables, same result.

If in doubt, move the CD-ROM all the way to the top. Then save the setting. Next time your computer boots it will check to see if a bootable CD exists in the CD-ROM drive and boot from that.

Help, I'm stumped! I just bought a new CD and the disc is labeled "Enhanced CD". When I insert it into my computer's CD drive, it opens up the music video of the feature song on the CD but none of ...

Booting from your USB drive will take a few extra steps over the live CD method. While your computer is probably set to check your CD drive for bootable discs, it probably isn't set to check your ...

Luckily, you don’t need an internal optical drive to rip a CD: External DVD drives that connect to your computer via USB, go for as little as $23, and will easily do the job without you having ...

To do this, bring your physical CD and external drive to a public computer, insert the disc, and plug in the external drive. The application to extract audio files will depend on the computer’s ...