Sorry you didn't have good luck with Dell Chat. The DDS log doesn't give info about the warranty, just the date the system was installed. If that was the case then yes, the warranty would be expired it could be that you only had a 90 day warranty.
Did you access your computer info there as I mentioned because you DON'T use chat for that and it should all be available also. You CAN download the original driver from there. I know this can be done because I just did it with a 6 year old computer I was reformatting without driver disks.

You might try downloading and installing this driver. I looked throughout Dell and this one is available.

http://www.dell.com/support/drivers/...iverid=R306360

Read the install information there. If it doesn't work, nothing lost/nothing gained and it WON'T hurt anything either.

I personally would not go through all the registry edits without being able to have the guarantee that it would work plus go through the hassle of trying to do all those registry edits and possibly cause other difficulties totally unrelated to the non-working drive. Especially since that is the only problem you are having with the computer. I wouldn't do a reformat either, awfully drastic for a piece of failed hardware. It may be that the drive itself is dead and you wouldn't know that until you were in the middle of the reformat because sometime in there you would have to have a working CD drive...you have to reinstall the drivers and those drivers are on the disk, no guarantee that they would be on the recovery partition. Plus very often the recovery partition reinstall will call for the recovery disk, which, if you burned them as you should have done the first time you booted the computer, would require a working CD drive. If the drive itself IS dead then you are in the same position.

You can also purchase an external CD/DVD driver. These plug into a USB slot on the OUTSIDE of the computer. Many people use these external drives. Lots of computers don't even come with internal CD/DVD drives.