Can anyone help me get the CD drive in my computer to work?

i sound like a cable problem to me. unplug both cables and replug them. to do that you have to unscrew the case and do it on both the back of the cd-drive and where it ends on the motherboard

What is it, a laptop? If the drive is removable, take it out, drop it in the trash, and buy a new one. If it’s not removable, buy yourself an external USB drive. If it’s a desktop, for crap’s sake, just go get another drive. They’re like 30 bucks.

buy another one? this is just what led everyone in this world out on loan. It is quite possible that the drive works perfectly fine and all it need is an unplug-plug the cables so the static electricity leaves it alone. I’ve seen this happen so many times on cd drives and hard disks

Failure rate on optical drives is pretty high. I’ll bet real money it’s a laptop. No cable. The clicking indicates a problem with the tracking mechanism, moving mechanical part. That’s the source of the high failure rate. The drive is toast. Buy a new one.

If it’s a laptop then the drive is toast anyways. I’ve never seen one of those repaired properly.

If it’s a desktop then there are three things I generally do whenever I have optical drive issues:
1) Check the cables. It’s rare that they move, but it’s happened often enough and simple enough that it’s never a bad place to start.
2) Run a cleaner through it. Sometimes it’s just dust on the lens.
3) Take it out and slap in another one. I have a few laying around from rigs I’ve scavenged and I believe in recycling. (@Sebulba Seattle is great for “recycled” computer parts, or even whole systems. There are quite a few stores that specialize in them.)

I have only lost one desktop optical drive in the last decade, but it is a fact that there are no user-serviceable parts in there so when they go it’s best to just replace them. Between the age and (especially) the clicking, I think it’s best to skip steps 1 and 2 since they will be about as useful as checking the oil in a car with one wheel missing.

While a click from the head traverse mechanism on a hard drive may be a matter of static making it twitch, optical drives are different enough that the only way to make them actually click is to screw up the mechanism in irreparable ways.