It's been a while since I last posted. I was BURNING a CD today using MusicMatch Jukebox, and towards the end of the burn, it said that there was a hardware failure and the DISC failed to burn, and after that, the drive worked for a while and continued to burn CDs, but when it gave out the hardware failure message again, I tried getting the drive to read CDs again, but to no avail. It won't read audio CDs, CD-Rs, or CD-ROMs. It still reads DVDs, but that's it. I've been using it for five years with no problems until now. In the past, the only problem I ever had was with WINDOWS detecting the drive at bootup, but that rarely happened, and the drive is detected. I checked the device properties, and it STATES that there's no problems and the device works properly.

It's on our Dell Dimension 8200, and we have Windows XP Home Edition. I'm not having any other problems with the computer at this time.

I can't believe it. It sounds like something's gone wrong with the CD lens.Sometimes that happens. Time, heavy use, poor manufacturing, who knows? The warranties are incredibly short, never over a year, so it may be time for a new one. Of course the mechanics can work (tray opens and closes) long after the optics go out.