I can no longer burn CD's on my combination CD/DVD burner

[Don Claybrook]

I have a strange problem on my home pc, and I'm hoping someone has run into this before and can enlighten me.

I have a 16X DVD burner that also burns CD's at 48X. I'm running Nero 6 Ultra on Windows XP. Everything worked fine until about a week ago.

Now I can no longer burn CD's. I can burn DVD's just fine. I can read both CD's and DVD's. I just can't write to a CD. And when I put a blank CD in the drive (I've tried several brands laying around the house), when the drive is trying to read the (empty) contents of the CD, I hear unhealthy clicking noises. I don't hear these noises with DVD's, or with CD's that already have data on them.

Does anyone know, are there different ASICs that control CD and DVD burning? I could understand this problem better if nothing would burn.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure it's time to buy a new one, but I thought I'd check with the techies here first.

Thanks.