Superdrive problem

[Thomas Little]

I'm running an 17" 1gig imac with 768 meg of memory, OS 10.2.8.
Sometime in the last month or two, I seem to have lost the CD burner
capability on the Superdrive. When it verifies the burn, it returns an error
#6 or sometimes #3. I've made a few coasters proving this; obviously I
hesitate to test DVD's. CDs from the same batch I bought earlier this year
worked then but not now.

For a while, it didn't want to recognize any CD at all, commercial or
otherwise. I couldn't even start up from a CD until I started ran fsck. If I
run Norton DD, even if it reports no problems, the drive will recognize
blank disks for a while, but still won't burn a blank.  This is what makes
me wonder if the problem is software rather than hardware.
I've done all the usual--permissions, disk utility, fsck, Cocktail's
routines, etc.
Anyone have any ideas?
Thanks,
Tom