Bah. Need help with disc drives

[Slanzinger]

...<sigh>..... Computers.

Right.
Computer basically won't read any optical discs properly. In either of its drives.
Top drive (DVD-RW drive) will spin and light up, and that's it. Trying to open the disc crashes Explorer until it's ejected.
Bottom drive (DVD-ROM) will read the disc but come up with CRC errors if I try to move any programs from it to the HDD (this is a PC-Advisor DVD disc) but will do pretty much the same as with the top drive for a CD-ROM disc.
This comes after having had problems with the DVD-ROM drive (which was top and jumpered as master), so switching them last week (i.e. so writer is now master and ROM is now slave). Seemed to work fine until just now.
Only change I made was to install Burnatonce in order to burn an ISO for a Linux install (to stick on an old pc) - but this has pretty much scuppered those plans  Uninstalled burnatonce right after these problems started (it told me the disc I tried to burn wouldn't work for some reason)
Have already tried exploiting the Plug-and-Pray system by uninstalling both drives and rebooting the system, to no avail. They both appear in device manager with "no issues" (Yeah right Windows... >_>).

...Any ideas what I can do? I'm seriously contemplating taking a sledgehammer to this machine soon...

[MrMxyzptlk]

Save yourself the time and cost and take the hammer to THE DISK, not the drives!

You've given all the info necessary to conclude that YOUR DISK IS DAMAGED/BAD/UNREADABLE.

Clean it with a soft, lint-free cloth (old pillow case or tee shirt is great for this) with a squirt of Windex (yes the father was right in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding!") and a wiping motion that ONLY goes from the inside of the disk, STRAIGHT to the outside edge (while slowly turning the disk after each wipe) WITHOUT touching anything but the inner (hole) and outside EDGES.

Let it dry for a few minutes and try it again.

[Slanzinger]

'Kay...
The CD-ROM now works in the DVD-RW drive. Blank discs are also recognised, the PC advisor disc still doesn't work (guessing that disc is faulty due to the CRC errors).
DVD-ROM drive, on the other hand, still completely refuses to read anything.

[MrMxyzptlk]

The drive could still be faulty, or even more likely - dirty.

With the drive's tray OPEN, and the can of air ALWAYS KEPT UPRIGHT, blow a few short bursts of canned air into the tray slot and see if that fixes it.

If not, and you don't want to do a bunch more diagnostics, it's time for a new DVD-ROM drive. (And given how inexpensive they are I rarely do more diagnostics than that myself nowadays....  )