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 McAfee, 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 (I have noticed that many people have this problem) 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)

Any thoughts? I am a big gamer, so I am very anxious to get it fixed and hope that I don't need to go without my PC games for long, so any help you can provide is greatly appreciated.

Hey, if you need any more info I will be happy to post back, and thanks in advance!

Sounds like you have approached this correctly from the software angle.
Now all that remains is checking the hardware it self.
A coupls of things,
1/ check that all cables are secure
2/ get yourself a CD/DVD lens cleaning disc and run it.

This issue could very easily be caused by a dirty lens.

If all this fails, then just replace it as they are a relatively cheap piece of hardware.

Make sure that the CD/DVD drive is connected to the computer.

I got one of those drive cleaners (the disks with brushes on the bottom), and it didn't work. I'm going to try another IDE input on the motherboard and see if that works, if it doesn't I think that I will have to buy another drive.