OK, so I put a CD in and all it does is make a weird noise a couple times and not read the CD! I have Windows XP and it shows up that there's no CD in the Drive, what the hells going on?

More info needed, did you buy the system complete with the CD player installed? If so return it to the supplier you bought it from. Guarantees a usually a year long. Otherwise I'm afraid to say you CD player is broken, by a new one. If you put it in yourself then check that the jumper settings are correct and the data cable is installed correctly. Also check if the CD's are original, if not then no one is going to help you. Test with originals. Other than that there is no much else you can do.

Hey, I have the same problem. When I put a CD or DVD into my drive, it makes a sound like the disk is skipping, but doesn't get read. The drive IS shown in My Computer, Device Manager, BIOS (CMOS), and System Info (which also all seem to say that the drive is working perfectly). If I right-click on the DVD drive icon in My Computer and select eject, the drive ejects. I literally was using the drive normally last week, with not even a hint of error, and the next day it was all messed up.

To fix it I have tried updating the driver, uninstalling and reinstalling the driver, and System Restore. Being somewhat of a computer geek, I find it highly unlikely, yet possible, that this is some sort of virus. Nevertheless, I tried doing a Norton Button Check, virus scan, Ad-Aware scan, and I even downloaded MacAfee, none of which fixed the problem.

As to a solution, I have only come up with a few things that I haven’t tried yet. One problem could lay in the IDE cable, however, the ability to eject it from My Computer makes this hard to believe. I have heard something about this happening a lot with XP SP2 (perhaps an error of some sort), this seems unlikely because I have had SP2 since I first started up the system (over a year ago), so wouldn’t this have happened immediately? To test that theory, I tried loading a music CD before Windows started up. The computer was stuck at “Boot from CD:” with no answer until I unloaded the disk. This would seem to indicate some sort of hardware problem, but one this widespread and quick seems amazingly improbable. To test this I plan to connect the drive to another computer (I will post back the results).

The system I own is custom (I bought the parts and put them together myself), but I have been using the computer for over a year now and nothing like this has happened before.

My basic specs, relevant or irrelevant, are:
Operating System: Windows XP Professional SP2
Processor: Intel Pentium 4 3.00 GHz
Graphics Card: ATI Radeon 9600 SE 128 MB
RAM: Dual 1.00 GB
DVD drive: 16x DVD (unknown company)

Well, I don’t think I helped fix the problem very much, but I hope that I was thorough enough for someone to help me (and all the other people that have this problem).