From the sound of it, your optical drive crapped out. They do that... A lot. Good news is it's pretty cheap and easy to replace. Still, it couldn't hurt to take it somewhere to get a second opinion. Without actually having access to the computer, it's hard to rule out a few other possibilities.
If you have a music CD around... A commercially pressed music CD that you bought from a store. Put that in the drive and see if it can read that. If not, then it's almost certainly your drive that's bad, but if it can, then it might just be you bought some really poor quality blank CDs or didn't store them properly, and now they've degraded beyond usefulness.
And just for future reference, burned CDs and DVDs will not last forever. Maybe 10 years if you buy high quality discs and store it in pretty ideal conditions, but they shouldn't be considered a permanent storage mechanism. So if you're storing important photos on CD, thinking that they will last more or less indefinitely, now would be the time to start looking for something else. And truth be told, there really aren't that many options for long term storage of digital media. Everything is subject to the laws of entropy in the universe. However, commercially pressed discs will last significantly longer than burned, so if these are important photos, you may want to look into places that will take your burned CDs and DVDs and make pressed versions.
I have unsuccessfully tried to retrieve files that I had previously burnt onto CD using the same PC. Similarly, I am having trouble trying to burn files onto a new CD. This has never happend to me before and am baffled as to why this is happening now. I don't use the CD-drive very often except to burn digital pictures a couple of times a year.
The message I get trying to access files on CD is as follows:
"Windows cannot access this disc. The disc might be corrupt. Make sure that the disc uses a format that Windows recognizes. If the disc is unformatted, you need to format it before using it."
Similarly, the message I get when I insert a new CD to burn is:
"Windows cannot read the disc in drive E:\ Make sure that the disc uses a format that Windows recognizes. If the disc is unformatted, you need to format it before using it."
I've never had to format or reformat before. Why now? I don't want to lose files by reformatting.
I would appreciate if someone could shed some light to this problem please....and most importantly, find an actual solution.
Thanking in advance.

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