I'm having an incredible frustrating mystery with a DVD drive not wanting to cooperate in Windows XP. I'm using a IBM Lenovo Thinkcentre M52 - One of the last IBM branded Lenovos that I hold near and dear. It's got a 3GHz Pentium 4, SATA and PATA controllers and a decent onboard graphics chip for retro gaming.

Problem is as follows:
* My optical drive suddenly stopped working. It didn't want to spin up and read the discs - I tried several CDs and DVDs but no difference, except for one instance when it all of a sudden worked...
* The drive is identified in BIOS and Windows. No driver issues.
* I tried deleting and reinstalling the drivers. No difference.
* Booting up in SAFE-mode makes no difference either.
* Went into command prompt mode and dried to access the drive there. Still no luck. I can enter the D:\ drive, but nothing happens when I run "dir".
* I also tried to edit autoplay modes and sharing properties. Made no difference.
* Naturally I had to consider a controller failure and reinstalled the chipset drivers, but that was fruitless.
* Maybe the IDE cable was broken? I tried two different cables. Made no difference.
* OK, time to replace the drive with one I knew was working of different brand that used a different driver. Made no difference. New drivers installed and identified by Windows XP, but still won't read anyting from the inserted disc.
* Then I tried to boot from the original Windows XP CD and that worked just fine, so I rebooted and started Windows normally again. But, now the CD can't be read anymore, and it isn't accessed when trying to boot from it either...
* So I wen't back to the original drive since the drive itself doesn't seem to be the issue. Same problem happens with both drives.
* OK, time to check the IDE controller. I installed a hard drive using the same cable. Everything works as it should. I copied files to and from the hard drive with zero issues.
* So, the cable, power, controller, IDE connector and everything else seems to be working just fine, but when I reattach the optical drive I still can't read any disc inserted...

UPDATE:
* Tried Windows Media Player to test an audio CD. Tried to RIP the CD, but it wasn't identified. But, after 5 minutes the CD suddenly starts and WMP rips the CD.
* Afterwards I managed to install a game and run it.
* Tested my luck and tried to install another game, but then, back to normal... Windows XP doesn't want to acknowledge a new CD. Sp back to not working.

Anyone got ideas? I'm running out of 'em. Since the issue happens both when trying to boot from the CD and when I'm inside Windows XP.