Acer :: Aspire 6930gIs My Optiarc BD-Rom Dead

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.