CDROM drive unable to read any cds

Hi I have a 48x Creative 4834E cd-rom drive. I am running Windows 2000 and Windows 98 and this problem occurs on both OSs. The cd-rom drive was working fine one minute then a couple of hours later the problem occured though the system and drive had not been touched. The problem is that whether I put any audio cd or data cd then the cd-rom busy light will flash at the same intervals for about a minute and during that the autoplay has not started up also during this there is some hard disk activity. Then when I attempt to access the cd all I get is a dialog asking me to insert a cd. I did not change the drivers at any time nor did I tweak with the computer at all. I tried the usual thing like uninstalling it and reinstalling it and Win 2K does detect it and says that the "device is working properly". I believe it is a hardware problem rather than a cd-rom problem and so would like to know whether it is quite likely that a 2 year old or less cd-rom drive would just fail? The eject feature does work fine. I was able to get it working for about 10mins though it was extremely slow at reading the cd by fiddling with it a bit including ejecting through the hole that has an eject button inside but then when I reset to make sure it did not work. If you have any idea about what could have happened please help also I have another cd-rom drive that works fine and uses the same standard Microsoft drivers and it's ATA controller uses the same drivers as my broken cd-rom drive and my and disk which is on the same channel as my cd-rom works fine. If you need more info please say and also it has been working fine in the same setup for about 3 months as I upgraded my stem 3 months ago.