DVD RW issue fixed by doing *nothing*

Last night I was pulling a lot of files off of a DVD onto my computer. Explorer.exe crashed due to me multitasking too much. This is XP Home sp2 btw. Anyhow, I went to restart the transfer, but when I try to open up G: (the drive) it gave me an "E: is unexceptionable...... I/O device error" Despite my experience I have never gotten one of these errors. My first reaction to this was (with any hardware error) to turn off and restart the computer. I tried again, same error. Well, I tried restarting, trying different DVD/CD's between restarts, nothing would work. This is my custom machine from the ground up, and the drive is a Lite-On DVDRW SHW-160P65. Anyhow, I put it to sleep while I was gone for the day, come back, and by God it works 0.o. I can't figure it out, the only thing I can figure is that it over heated, because I was transferring files from DVD's without much of a break for about 30 minutes.