My dvd drive will not play some disks

I have a Sony DDU-1612 dvd drive, 16x speed. It is about 4 months old.

It has always worked fine no matter which type of disk I put in it. But a few days ago I started having problems with it. It will not play DVD games, DVD movies or cd games. It WILL play audio cds and let me open files on cds that have files burned onto them. When I try to play a cd or dvd game, or a dvd movie, it will spin the disk and the lights will come on, but eventually a message will come up saying Please Insert a Disk into Drive F, even though there is a disk in it already. I have tried many different disks of all types to make sure it wasn't the disk itself.

I tried reinstalling the PowerDVD bundled software that came with the drive, but that did not help. The drive shows up in My Computer, the Properties say the drive is working properly and nothing shows wrong in Device Manager. So far as I know, Windows says I have the most updated driver (is there such a thing for dvd drives?). I also tried running the Windows troubleshooter with no luck.

Anyone have an idea what is wrong or how to fix it? It just started doing this a few days ago, and I can't think of anything I may have done to mess it up. I did move some game files from a burned dvd onto my hard drive, and the troubles started soon, but not immediately after this. (BTW, they were just game skins, not a game itself) I know very little about this type of thing and I appreciate any help you can give!

Thanks,

Jen

Intel D865PERL mobo
Pentium 4 2.8 ghz
1024 RAM
GeForce FX5900XT 256 vid card
Soundblaster Audigy 2 sound card
Seagate Barracuda 7200rpm SATA hard drives 160GB x2
TDK DVD-RW 880N dvd burner
Sony DDU-1612 dvd drive
Windows XP Pro Sp1

 

Try getting the latest driver, also check for firmware updates.