cd-rom not recognizing music cd's

i just returned an acer 50X pos drive for a buslink 52X pos drive. the acer would recognize certain music media, but not all. my creative cdrw 8432 recognizes ALL of the music cds im referring to. the buslink won't recognize some the acer would.

intel d815eaa mobo
pIII 800eb
sb iive! platinum
creative annihilator geforce 2mx 32mb ddr
40 gb uata 100 maxtor
win 98se
creative 8432 cdrw
creative dsi modem
on board lan

thanx team!

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"A man that loves whiskey, and hates kids, can't be all bad"
~W.C. Fields

I've had this happen to me with two drives in the past. One was some No-Name brand 40X drive and the other was a memorex 48X drive. Both times I called their tech support line and was told to return the drive. When I got the drive back, it worked fine. I am currently using an Acer drive at home, I it has worked better than any other other drive that I owned.

Are the music cd's originals or copies?, I had the same problem with copied cd's not being recognised and it ended up being the burning software not set to copy as a wave file.
If they are originals take back the cd rom drive.

It is probably a bad CDROM

If the CDROM has hadphone Jack + Play Button, do the following;
Start the computer in MSDOS mode (6.22 not 7), Place one of your "non Readbale CD's in the CD, and try to play.
if it plays on the Hardware level it is definitly a Driver/Software Problem.

i get the cd to play in dos.... can't find any updated drivers on the buslink site or through ms. another thing, i am unable to enable digital cd music on either drive through multimedia settings in control panel. i have digital spdif connects to the soundcard and on the drive. wtf? also, when i put a data cd in the cd rom, it runs fine but sounds like a damn vaccuum cleaner. i think the lens is out of alignment. it is a 52X. i think in dos it only runs at quad or less and may have something to do with the cd recognition because it does not sound like a vaccuum under the dos environment. even when i disable cdrom boot in bios, if i have a music cd in the drive, it will hang as it loads the drivers for the ir remote for the sb live! platinum drive.

any more idears will be greatly appreciated. i work again on wed. and will exchange the drive at that point if no headway is made.

thanx again!

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"A man that loves whiskey, and hates kids, can't be all bad"
~W.C. Fields

Two things -
A. you said "i get the cd to play in dos...." this means NOTHING is wrong in the Drive...
B. LOL - "i am unable to enable", really good...

i'm gonna clean install win 98 and all drivers over again. using the onboard audio, i'll try playing the music cd's (to see if it's a conflict with the creative warez or drivers) before installing the sb live! and drivers. it is VERY strange that i don't have ANY problems when playing cd's in my creative 8432 cdrw via digital spdif or analog cd audio, but cannot play cd's under windows environment at all. actually, something else strange happened. i manually changed the udma mode for the cd rom drive in the bios from 0-4, and each time tried playing the cd. at mode 1, i got 2 seconds of music before the system hung ( bsod prompting for a restart that sadly can never be because teh 3 finger salute does nothing) i don't wanna spend the hours of fun on christmas reinstalling everything on the puter. please give some insight so i don't gotta.

ps. i will just remove the sound card and drivers before i format and clean install, just to see.

thanx team!

------------------
"A man that loves whiskey, and hates kids, can't be all bad"
~W.C. Fields

Hmmmm,
It seems that "Format c:/u" is the best sollution almost Ever
hehehehee...

My old Toshiba (32x - 4x DVD) wouldent read most backup - copied cd`s, but my new one (48x - 16x DVD )will read every type and so will my Yamaha (16x - 10x - 40x) so it just depends on the drive, if it wont, send it back, say its crap, and get a new one, (repeat until in possesion of working drive)