OT - CD read problem

Here's one for the hardware gurus out there. I have a year-old CD/DVD drive
that suddenly quit working, and I just wasted a couple hours messing around
with it. I replaced the cable, rebooted a couple of times, and removed an
old CD drive that I thought might have been contending for resources somehow.
After I removed the old drive the new one worked again-briefly. I was
fooled into thinking I'd found the problem! But after putting the case back
together, etc., it quit again. (I reopened it again to check my cabling but
it was fine.) I suppose the problem could be the CD itself, or the
motherboard - it's the only device on the secondary IDE, and the jumper is
set to "master", as it should be. Short of buying another drive, or swapping
the questionable drive into another system (and risking hosing that one up,
too :-) ) I'm not sure what else to try.

Symptoms: The drive mounts OK, but when I try to "ls" or "cd" it, the
message is "bash: cd: /mnt/cdrom: Input/output error" I've also noticed that
in dmesg there are a number of CD-failure related messages, the most notable
being:

hdc: packet command error: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hdc: packet command error: error=0x54
hdc: command error: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hdc: command error: error=0x54
end_request: I/O error, dev 16:00 (hdc), sector 64
isofs_read_super: bread failed, dev=16:00, iso_blknum=16, block=32
cdrom: open failed.

And then that last one repeats a bunch of time. I've tried to clean it I
can't tell if the drive is actually trying to spin the cleaning disk.

Another interesting symptom:  when I try to unmount the CD, it says:
umount: it seems /mnt/cdrom is mounted multiple times                         

The line from fstab is:
/dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom supermount user,fs=iso9660,dev=/dev/cdrom 0 0             
And yes, hdc is mapped to /mnt/cdrom

Does it sound like this one's ready for the dumpster? Shame, I never even
played any DVD's on it - after I got Xine working on my notebook, I figured
I'd try this one, too.

Thanks for any sage advice you can offer me.

Vaughn