both of my samsung drives died a similar death... can anyone help me revive them?

gah, this is so unfortunate. i bought a samsung cd burner back when dvd burners had not become main stream yet. i liked it so much, i bought a samsung dvd burner hoping to get the same quality. i soon found out that it seemed to be a little less, but whatever -- about the same.

now to the details. i have the 48x32x48 samsung cd burner (can't be arsed to look up model number, sry) and the TS-H552B dvd burner. the cd burner died about 2 weeks ago, with symptoms of not being able to read disks, sitting there at the boot screen waiting for a long time before the drive became "ready" to be able to boot. i figured the drive just had seen better days sense it was showing its age anyway. now, my TS-H552B, which is only a few months old, i was burning with. inbetween burning cd's it did the exact same thing. i'd burned 9 successful cd's in this same session (note: cd's not dvd's). i put in the next cd to be burned, and BOOM there it was.

no i have a very expensive intricate paper weight. it does read regular cd's that were not burned, but nothing else. actually, to be more specific i have only tried the actual samsung drivers cd, which it reads fine (but takes a while to "initialize" when you first put the cd in).

does anyone have any clue what the problem might be? i just updated the firmware with seemingly no affect on the drive at all (it was successful though). i'm using TS08.

btw: i'm a newbie to all of this, so sorry in advance if my terminology is off or if this is a dumb question or whatever.

so no one has any info for me at all? this is unfortunate, i guess i just have a bad omen around me or something.