DVD drive caused pC to run slow

[Shikhar]

I have a P3 800Mhz PC with Win XP Home and Win98SE OSs. LG DVD ROM drive and Samsung CDRW configured as secondary master & secondary slave respectively.
When I started my PC after 12 days , my LG DVD ROM drive refused to open. Even in the my computer of win xp and win98se E: was not shown. I took a needle and put it into the small hole to open the drive. It then started to open and close normally but E: was still not shown in the my computer.
I restarted my PC and then E: was also recognised. But when I inserted a disc into my drive it worked well for 5 minutes then my PC hung. After restarting I put another disc into it , it worked well this time but my PC became sluggish. The CPU usage is less than 50% and free ram available is 132MB of the 320MB available. Even 290MB of virtual memory is free.

[swatkat]

Do they work correctly in SAFE mode?
Check the connectors, both Data and Power, of the drives.
Also, in the BIOS, load the default settings.

[Shikhar]

I restored the factory settings of BIOS and started Windows XP in safe mode and found both the drives shown. Later when I started Windows XP in normal mode both the drives were shown.
Later at 9PM when I turned on my PC only LG DVD ROM drive was shown. Now when I have started my PC only Samsung CDRW drive is being shown. So one of the two drives is shown at a given time. Haven't checked the power and data cable as yet.