I formatted a friends daughters laptop

not so long ago which had exactly the same DVD drive as the one mentioned (The Matshita DVD-RAM UJ870QJ) and it was stupid, stupid, stupid and ridiculously temperamental!
The symptoms where exactly the same.
Now i`m not an expert by any means and don`t really know why it started working when it did but i installed Nero 7 OEM (i know

) and after that it seemed to work fine most of the time (and still is by all accounts)!
This was after reading several pages of problems concerning said drive and lots of people seemed to be having "issues".
Personally i think it`s a POS, a format may help, it may not, it just seemed to me to be a dodgy piece of hardware to begin with and why installing Nero helped well
Just my