HP Pavilion dv6700 cd drive not found in device manager?

My mother bought this labtop a few years ago. Well like 3 years ago (maybe 2 years after owning the labtop) the cd drive quit working. My mom paid a hundred and some dollars to have a guy fix it and say that it just went out and recommended that she just buy a external hardrive. She got one at a pawn shop then that one went out and she had no one to call so she went and bought one. When I installed that one it read the installation cd just fine but the 2nd cd we put in there again it wouldn't read. So i called the external harddrives customer support. He was the one who told me to go look in the Device Manager and tell him what I saw when I looked at the cd/dvd drives. It has a red exclemation point next to the external one and a yellow next to the internal one. The guy said he couldn't help me farther because it was a computer problem not with their problem. So i did a full system recovery. It worked great and the internal disk drive started to work again until a few days ago. It started having a hard time finding the cd drive again sometime, but if i restarted the computer it would be there. But today it wont find it at all. I even did a full system recover and updated everything, but it still wont find it. I have been going through hundreds of forums and read one that said something about a magicDrive which is a virtual disk drive helping them. So i tried it. Now my device manager says there is a cd/dvd drive but the only one that comes up is the magicDrive and it says it has no cd. I still have no idea what to do... If anyone out there as any new ideas or should she just get a new labtop?