Thanks Ray, I tried this and I can now 'see' the cds, but still can't install software. Do you know of a decent guide for the best way to clean the lens?

What's going on here? Stick a DVD in the drive and everything works fine. Stick a CD in and the drive spins away but doesn't open the CD. If I try opening the disc from Windows I get a D:\ is not accessible I/O error message. I'm running the standard Windows XP Professional edition on a Thnikpad R51.

When I boot my Thinkpad R51 the first message I see tells me I can interrupt the boot process by hitting the AccessIBM key. According to the Lenovo support documentation I should see a message saying: "To Start the Product Recovery program, press F11" If I hit F11, the computer just boots to Windows...