Acer Aspire 6930g - Is my Optiarc BD-Rom dead?

Hi, I would very much appreciate any help you may be able to give on the following:

I have an Acer Aspire 6930G notebook, it approx 3 months old and was running without problem until last week when the Optiarc BD-Rom BC-5500S drive stopped loading/playing or recognising any discs in the drive whether DVD, CD or BD-Rom - all that happens is that the BD ROM drive makes a "B-Dum, B-Dum, B-Dum" noise at the regular rate of about once per second and after about 2 minutes of this timesout. If you right click on the Drive icon and select "Explore", then the drive tray ejects and the message screen "please insert a disc into drive F:" displays - when I insert a disc into the try and close then the all that happens is the noise as described about again. I do not hear a fast spinning sound at all, just the slow steady B-dum noise.

What I am trying to find out is whether the drive is broken and it is a hardware malfunction, or whether it could possibly be a driver problem or Windows Vista problem causing this, or even whether something simple like the 30-day trial of "Powerdirector" that was pre-installed but since elapsed, could have somehow caused the disc to stop working. I know nothing about filter drivers, but could this be something to look into?

Nothing loads at all - no audio Cd's no DVD's, no data discs, no blank discs. It seems strange that neither laser appears to be activating.

I bought the notebook over the internet from Amazon so am trying to find out if this is a hardware or software problem first, before contacting them, as if it is a software problem this would not be covered under the warranty.

Many thanks for any help offered.
Cheers.

Thanks for your help MichelleG :
I have done as you suggested and have tried booting from a recovery DVD - I am pleased to say that this worked first time and the BD-Rom whirred into action and Windows loaded up just fine, so the drive appears to not be dead after all!! - which is great news. I then changed dvd's and inserted a picture disc dvd which autoplayed first time. However, with the next disc I tried, it's back to the B-Dum, B-Dum, B-Dum and failing to load. It's as though something in Windows Vista is stopping the drive from activating, but I dont know what it could be. I tried the whole procedure again to make sure this follows a pattern and is not just a fluke and the same thing happened.

Should I try restoring Windows to an earlier point? or should I restore right back to the out of the box state (and lose all my application installations / settings, etc., or is there another step I should try first? Any help or advice would be much appreciated. Thanks for your help so far -
Cheers.

Hi everyone - thanks for your help here:
I have tried the system repair, but this did not find any problems, so will have to try system restore to an earlier point and see if this sorts out the problem. I don't want to have to boot from a recovery boot disk every time in order to be able to use the drive. I will be so pleased if anyone knows the solution.
Cheers.

Hi again, just to add a further update:
I have now set the bios to: "F12 Boot Menu: Enabled" and will leave this setting enabled permanently in the bios as making this change seems to have cured the problem with the bd rom drive and windows vista starts up without me having to have a boot disk in the drive and doesn't seem to slow up startup significantly, so unless anyone can advise of any problems in using this setting, I will carry on using this configuration. I am happy that the drive is working again. Still confused as to why this problem has occurred though!
Any comments greatly appreciated.
Thanks again.

Hi, I haven't upgraded or flashed the bios at all (not sure how to do this for one thing, and as the laptop is still quite new, less than 3 months old, I didn't want to do anything that might void the warranty in case it needs to go back).
Regards.