OK now I'm starting to freak wondering what the hell is going on with my new drive! I get bad thoughts about having to return the thing already and having to deal with the frustrations and anger which this would cause for me. But first I open the drive and visualy check the disk in the tray, I close it again hope this would somehow help, no deal! The same noise happens again, and again the "start" button isn't highlighted, so I head over to the boards to find some posts about the drive and what might be the problem, but before I do, I thought I would check the disk one more time, lucky I did! what did I find to be the cause of the "drive failure"? well being the short-sighted fool that I am, I forgot to put the disk in the drive WITHOUT REMOVING THE CLEAR PLASTIC DISK THAT WAS ON TOP OF THE CDs!!!!

I'm just glad that it's not a serious problem (unless the drive was somehow damaged by this? the drive didn't spin up at all) so I thought it would be good to tell others what happened in case someone else strikes a similar "problem" and ends up feeling and looking a silly as I do

All the best,
Steven