With your reshuffling, it's possible that you do have an "installation error."

There have been a number of revisions to standards for both CDs and for DVDs that have required updated drivers, and moving a drive to a different machine, especially to one with a different OS version, may have gotten you an obsolete driver. If the manufacturer of the drive is identifiable, you may be able to get updated drivers, and in some cases updated drive BIOS downloads.

Optical drives generally face a number of different data "formats" that require installing a number of codex files to work with all the different variations in disks you stuff into them. Once a good driver is installed, recent Windows versions are good at prompting you to load a needed one, and usually have what's needed on your installation disk (or in the CAB files installed with the OS) but older versions may not recognize what's needed, or may not have the appropriate ones.

DVD drives, or DVD functions on combination DVD/CD drives, are prone to "mechanical" failures. A fairly common one is that the drive can't spin up to the higher rpm required for DVD playback, or can't hold the higher disk speed sufficiently stable. The lower playback speed for CD playback, and even for CD burning, frequently remains available in this case. A manufacturer's website may have a diagnostic program you can download to check out your drives, although the quality of support available is somewhat "spotty."

John