AOpen CDRW acting up

[Rebel7254]

My AOpen 24x10x40 CDRW drive has started making an awful, grinding-roaring sound when I play CD's in it. It hasn't always done this. I'm afraid to burn anything with it because something may be wrong. I've tiried to uninstall/reinstall it and then downloaded and installed some sort of upgrade from AOpen (not a driver, some kind of file that increased media coverage or whatever) and no luck. It's always made a high pitched, screeching noise but I think that's normal though. It just started acting up recently. It'll keep making that loud noise even 30 or 45 seconds after I stop playing the CD, and the LED blinks in an unusual pattern compared to before it started all of this. I tried using a CD-ROM cleaning disc and that didn't help either. Any ideas?

 

[amdskip]

how old is it, they don't last very long it seems

 

[cliftonite]

yeah, my liteon 24x lasted me about a year But with daemon tools and nearly 600 gigs of HD space, I rarely burn any cds

 

[Rebel7254]

It's about 9 months old.