my CD drives decided to stop reading cd's for no apparent reason, plz help

Hi all,

Ok here's the synopsis. About 2 months ago my CD drives decided to stop reading cd's for no apparent reason. I tried everything from uninstalling the drives, to reinstalling them, both in windows and physically removing them. I have updated the chipset drivers, the firmware, uninstalled and reinstalled the ASPI layer, checked the IDE settings were at DMA not PIO. I have changed the position of the drives from secondary to primary on the motherboard and ensured that the jumpers were correct on them. The motherboard seems fine as the F: drive works on the secondary IDE channel.

Finally I gave up and last night formated my C: drive and installed XP Pro today, expecting this to resolve my problem. HOWEVER - After the CD drive installed XP Pro from the cd, I removed it and inserted a cd which contained loads of setup execs to install. The problem of unreadable cd's remains in windows!!!

I have tried original game cd's and data cd's that I have previously burned - nothing works. How can the CD drive read the XP Pro CD to install the operating system - then 2 minutes later decide not to read anything at all?????

I have tried absolutely everything I can think of - please someone HELP!!!!!

System is AMD Athlon 1600XP, 512mb DDR RAM, A-Open AK77 Pro Motherboard, Operating System XP

Maybe a stupid remark of my part, but are you're cd's clean?
Did you try to clean your CD player with a cd cleaner?