My drive can read a CD-ROM, it can play an audio CD, but it will not write.  Problem may be related to a previous problem.
A month ago..My CD-ROM drives were not being recognized.  Yea...they worked before, also wrote, but at that time windows was not recognizing them. They would show up at bootup and in the BIOS settings, I've tried reinstalling them, unplugging and replugging in the IDE cables, running a virus scan...
they still showed up with a ! in a triangle in the Hardware Manager.
I then solved the problem with an edit in the bios.  when the aparent problem was solved, I never bothered to check if they would write to a BLANK cd.
The solution was:
"START > RUN (type in: REGEDIT) click OK
click '+' BESIDE HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
click '+' beside SYSTEM
click '+' beside CONTROLSET00# (<-- see EX1 below)
click '+' beside CONTROL
click '+' beside CLASS
click on {4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}
on the righthand window, you may see, UpperFilters & Lowerfilters
right click on them and delete them.  (I only had lowerfilters)

(EX1) for above CONTROLSET00#
You may have one controlset folder number 001.
You could have many. Follow the above steps for each one.
REBOOT. Should be no more conflicts now cd-rom wise ANYHOW"

any body got any ideas where to look?

What are you using to burn CDs?  "Windows software."  I am using windows software.
I KNOW the drives work because I exchanged harddrives
with the same operating system (XP homE) and both drives work fine

farbeWindows software as in the software that XP has built-in? Or software that is COMPATIBLE with XP? Be specific...

[GLB]Flame[/glb]? cdrw