Urgent: Quick and easy way to fix a disk drive?

So, I’ve been away from my laptop for quite a while now, and I only just finally powered it back up this August...

I'm using an HP, running Windows 10...

If I recall correctly, the system was prompting me last week to run some updates, so I went ahead and let those finish installing...

Then yesterday, for the first time in ages, I actually tried to burn a movie to a disc, and thank God it worked perfectly fine on the first try. But when I went to reload it just to double-check everything was okay, the drive wouldn't cooperate at all—I had to play it straight from the DVD. Now, today, the drive seems to have given up entirely; it was giving me a few error messages earlier this morning, but now it’s just complete silence...
I'm honestly at a bit of a loss as to what to do next...🤣🤣🤣

I was really hoping to get some more movies burned today... please, if anyone has any advice, I'd truly appreciate the help.

There isn't much we can do to help if we're looking at a hardware issue—like a physical malfunction with the optical drive itself. Maybe try popping in a standard CD or DVD (one you haven't burned yourself) just to see if it picks it up? If it doesn't, then you'll know exactly where the problem lies...

RESOLVED