My DVD drives quit working.... Sort of?

Here is my dilemma... I have a Dell, with TWO DVD drives in it, one a standard DVD reader and the other an HP DVD-RAM/RW. On thursday last week all was well... then Fri/Sat there was (I THINK) an update to windows which forced a reboot and BSOD. I rebooted the system and all came back fine (or so I thought), now however, neither DVD drive will read a commercial DVD, ones I have recorded work fine... but both of them seem not to be able to even see the commercial ones, the drive spins up, the light flashes a few times, then it quits... and no disk is present (or so it says), I have tried the obvious... remove from hardware manager, reboot, checked the cables,cleaned it (or tried to, that to is a commercial item and the drive does not recognize it... sigh).

Everything in the system seems to be operating correctly... while the one drive is several years old, the other is just now hitting the one year mark... I suppose it is possible that my write died and took the reader with it, but it seems suspect that both drives exhibit the same behaviour... stuff I recorded reads fine, commercials simply are invisible to the system.