strange cd/dvd reading problems

I have a friend who is having some computer problems. He was running win98 with a seperate dvd player and cd burner. The dvd player stopped playing burned cd's though. After a while, he upgraded to xp and it worked for a little bit again. But then it started having the same problems even with xp. It eventually got to the point where it wouldn't read any data cd (burned or not), it would only recognize audio cd's or dvd's. And with the audio and dvd's, it does some screwy things. Every audio cd he puts in, it only thinks it has 2 tracks one being like 3 min or so and the other being around an hour. He contacted gateway and they ran through some stuff with him trying to get it to work and eventually just sent him a new dvd-rom. He installed it and it didn't work, so they sent him a second and it didn't work either. And now, his burner is doing the same things as the dvd player. He tried uninstalling the drivers for both and rebooting to let xp find the new hardware and reinstall the drivers but that didn't help. Does anybody have any ideas about would could be causing this, or how to fix it. Gateway isn't being any help and he is getting very frustrated.

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No ideas anyone? I know its hard to know whats wrong with such a small description of whats happening but any ideas about whats happening would be helpful. Also ideas of what to do to help narrow it down a little more.

The only idea I has was to play with DMA stuff, but I can't imagine that Gateway didn't already have him do that.

I suppose it might also be a problem with the computer's IDE channel instead of the drive. Have you tried the drive in another computer?

When the problem started, had you installed additional software which screws with the ASPI layer by any chance?

had you installed additional software which screws with the ASPI layer

Not too sure since its not me thats having the problem. Its a friend of mine. I'll try and find out a little more info on it later tonight.