CD-RW won't work anymore

WIn98 with all the updates
PII 450 512 meg ram

Primary Western Digital 80gig
slave SONY CRX-0811 CD-R/RW burner

Secondary Maxtor 30gig
Slave Creative DVD

Okay so here is the situation. My burner worked fine. My old Western digital 10gig died. Bought the new 80gig. Did a fresh install of the OS and updated it. Installed my hardware. My CD-R drive is recognized during POST but now it rarely reads disks. Stamped or burned. IT was new last year and it uses MS MMC drivers I guess since none come with the burner. Also, in any burner app I am told to insert a blank disk when it infact is. I have five different media types and none are working. The drive just hogs the system as it searches for readable data forever and ever. I tried removing my secondary HD and reconnect my CD-R as master on IDE 2. But still got same result. You think its possible that even though my primary is a WD like my old one that its causing a communication conflict when the CDR is on IDE1? Even though this did not happen with the older drive? Tried turning off DMA for the CD-R and yes auto-insert is deactivated. But alas, nothings different. Also, after safe boot, there are no accidental ghost references to the drives. Thoughts appreciated.