I did a fresh install of 10.6.2 and without even checking the disc drive performed an upgrade to 10.6.4 so I could install XCode.

Today I popped in the SnowLeo disc so I could install X11, and it shows the disc as a blank recordable DVD! I popped in a music CD, and it claims the disc is "unreadable."

It takes about 3 minutes for it to even error out. It just sits there spinning for those 3 minutes.

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OS X can see my drive, it shows up in System Profiler, but it can't read discs.
Now clearly, it did read a disc at some point, because the installer is based on OS X, and it installed fine.

My system is an AMD Athlon X2 4400+ with an NForce 520 chipset.
(It's set to "IDE" mode because "AHCI" mode hangs the boot process, it never finds the boot device in AHCI mode.)

Hopefully you guys can point me in the right direction, thanks .
Let me know if you need any more info about my system!