With the laptop there should have came diskette with the cdrom drive drivers on it, those have to be copied to the harddrive first before you can actually do anything with the cdrom. If she doesn't have the disk you should be able to go to the gateway website and download them and boot to a boot up disk. I know this because i worked for gateway for 3 years.
If you know the SN of the computer go here, if not just go the second link.
gateway online support
drivers 
