>I've seen CD-ROM and DVD-ROM drives go bad after a while. Even seen one where it was bad straight out of the box (no wonder it was on sale for a ridiculously low price). Easiest solution is to just simply install a replacement and see if the problem goes away.
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>Ah yes -- one other thing -- for CD-R and DVD-R avoid Ritek brand -- I know a lot of people who have had reliabilty problems with the media (disk is OK for a month or two, then start having errors -- after about 6 months the disc is unreadable).
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>Speaking of bad media... I once saw a batch of "no-name" CD-Rs where the foil layer was translucent. The disc would often read OK -- until you wrote something with marker on the label side. If you had written on a self-adhesive paper label.it was slightly better (reliability was directly connected to opacity of the label). Worked best with foil label as it was sufficiently opaque to allow the writing on label side to show through on the data side.

I've bought spools of 100 blank DVD's before and had 10 of them be bad quite often. I had one spool of 100 were over 1/2 of them were no good...(some cheapo on sale junk ones).

I've given up on putting ANYTHING on CD or DVD anymore. I just buy those portable USB powered 500 gig hard drives now. Costs 100 bucks and fits in a pocket - a lot eaiser to lug around than 100 DVD's or 700 CD's. Need to hand the guy next to you somthing? I keep a couple of those 2gig USB sticks around you can get for 10 bucks or less. Got to snail-mail someone something? Forget it and setup a temp FTP server on yer machine and let them grab it.
Once these solid-state drive prices come down I'll be using those. Like anything else- backup backup backup. I buy those 500gig drives in pairs, keep one to use and one to backup the first one and store somewhere else.