DVD-RAM Drive problem

Hey,

first of all I got no idea how cdrom drives work, all the differences between cds and dvds etc, I just know bits and pieces.

Anyways, yesterday I formatted my hard drive and installed windows XP, fresh, clean and legal. Installed drivers from the motherboard cd (a cd that came with my MB) and I tried to install my VGA drivers form another cd(that cd didnt work), I think the drive couldnt read it or something. I thought the cd might got scratched or something so I just downloaded the latest drivers from the AMD site. Evrything works perfect. I wanted to install an old game I had (Arx Fatalis) which came on a dvd, drive could read it fine with no problems. Then I tried to install another old game which came with 2 cds. None of them work. Why? I tried another dvd (worked). Is it possible for my drive to read DVDs but not CDs, but then how the hell it read the Windows XP cd from which I formatted (a CD-R I burned myself mind you). Thanks in advance.


EDIT: I forgot to explain what exactly happens when it doesnt work. I put the cd in the drive, it makes some noises, I hear a spin, and then I just see the led on the drive going on and off. I also hear some small noises like a spin or something like that. When I double click on the dvd ram drive the window stops responding and after a while it opens a blank page like the cd has no files in. In properties it shows like the cd has 0 bytes. That happened with 3 different cds.