Well, I've replaced the drive with a new HP IDE one as my PC is HP and it seemed similar in spec to the LiteOn original. The new LiteOn i found before was listed wrongly and the used ones on eBay were different models that looked like they had more buttons & what looked like a volume control, so I thought it safest to go with the HP.

It, of course, successfully reads and writes CDs (& DVDs) which confirms the problem was not with drivers or anything else in the PC , but with the drive hardware itself.

The old drive had corrupted 4 of my CD-RWs, but after an eternity of accessing it I have managed to initialise & write at least 1 of them. Once written it is accessed fast.

Nice one

Funny how the old drive read DVD's but not CD's though...in terms of writing, I had a drive once that wrote to CD's OK but the last GB of data on a single layer DVD, where the surface speed near the outside of the disc is much faster, would often be poorly written.

Not so funny - the CD and DVD use different laser frequencies, most often implemented as different laser devices which happen to use the same final lens system to get the beam to the CD/DVD.
With the dual-purpose devices I've had and fixed for other people, most start by failing one disk type while the other carries on working (for a while).

As a backup for the future have you considered using a caddy and a external SATA drive.

I use one of these for my netbook and it means I can use it on any of my PC's if I nned to in a hurry.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ziboo-ZIPAD1-Netbook-enclosu...

That enclosure takes a laptop drive and has space for a laptop HDD as well and isn't a bad price.

No, that's no diff from an internal IDE; both can fail in the same way.

Particularly as dandnsmith has finally confirmed that these drives have dual lasers that can fail in the way I experienced.

No. I can always back up to a USB Flash Drive as a fall-back.

Probably the simplest way to check this would have been to try booting from a CD.

In reply to a post by XRaySpeX:

... Well, I've replaced the drive with a new HP IDE one as my PC is HP and it seemed similar in spec to the LiteOn original. The new LiteOn i found before was listed wrongly and the used ones on eBay were different models that looked like they had more buttons & what looked like a volume control, so I thought it safest to go with the HP....

As long as you buy a replacement with the same connection imterface, brand etc doesn't matter. As far as Windows itself is concerned, you'll only see minor and temporary problems if a different interface type (IDE-SATA/SATA-IDE) is used. I'm not sure how some burning software would react in this case though.

In reply to a post by Deadbeat:

Probably the simplest way to check this would have been to try booting from a CD.

Unlikely, as it would not read any CD! Anyway did try Hiren's Boot CD.

Yes thanks, I know all about IDE/PATA vs. SATA. I was more interested in compatibility of ancillary features, like disk labelling.

In reply to a post by XRaySpeX:

Unlikely, as it would not read any CD! Anyway did try Hiren's Boot CD.

If it wouldn't read a CD from boot, it had failed. That proved, there's no point in messing about in Windows with transfer settings or uninstalling drivers etc.

Never did! Anyway it's all over now