Problem with DVD optical drive - wrong drive?

I have an HP Pavilion dv9500 laptop. The DVD-RW optical drive with Lightscribe worked well for the first 18 months of computer life. Now the drive will not play video DVD's and will not write data DVD's or CD-ROM's. It will read and play some autoplay videogame cd-roms. I can put a data CD-ROM into the drive and when I click on the Computer icon and then on the Drive E: optical drive icon it says "device not found." But if I right click on the Drive E: icon and click on "Explore" then I can explore the contents of the CD-ROM. I went to the HP support website for my dv9500 and downloaded the firmware for the drive. The HP site calls the drive the Toshiba TS-L802A drive and when I try to install the firmware it says "device not found." The computer device manager says the drive is a "Slimtype DVD A DS8A1H ATA Device." I'm not sure quite what the problem is or how to go about diagnosing or fixing it. Any ideas?