Well, some of my audio cd-r backups from about 8~9 years ago are giving me trouble...

A standalone cd player can play the audio, so at least the data is still "there".

But my Plextor dvd burner can't even detect anything at all.  (as in, no disc inserted)
I'm guessing it's probably due to the newer dvd & combo drives accessing the data in a different way than older drives used to... 

So I'm thinking of maybe looking for just a plain old CD-ROM drive from like 98 or something, to maybe increase the chances of being able to rip these old cd-rs again... Does that seem like a decent option?  Anyone else keep an old cd-rom drive attached to to their computer as a fallback reader/ripper, and does it help read discs when newer drives can't?

I recently read an article stating the life of any burned CD is relatively shorter than any true-blue pressed CD. They were saying at about the five year mark CD-R's can start to degrade. I honestly don't know truthful this article was since I don't think I have any CD-Rs that are that old or older. If it is, I think the five year mark is a little too early to worry about losing data. I know that isn't exactly encourging news.

I see where you coming from trying an older drive... I use to have to use an very old external CD burner to rip the one disc of my Saga Frontier OST and the last song from my FF Mystic Quest CD (and they are mint). Sometimes slowing down the speed the CD is read at helps A LOT as ripping/reading at x48 and x52 can seem to cause problems sometimes. However, once you get them working I suggest making new back-ups of them (I think that falls into the NO-$H!T category, not to insult your intellegence in anyway)

Carl, I work in IT and we have some old computers lying around. I can send you a CD drive if you want me to. E-mail me if you want me to start digging in the inventory room for ya!

I dug around and discovered I still have a generic 40x CD-ROM drive buried in a box of spare parts, so I'll have to hook it up and see.   Thanks for the offer though, I'll try this out first and let ya know if it works any better.

Oh, and Ashley, it's likely related to the TOC area (Table of Contents), since it won't detect the disc at all, so ripping speed wouldn't apply at this point.

Carl, let us know how that turns out. I have some older drives, as well.

Success!   The plain ol' CD-ROM drive was able to detect and play the discs right off the bat with no problems.     

I'll just have to mess with some options in EAC, as the extractions are going at like .5x at the moment, then I realised some of these advanced settings weren't even invented yet when this particular drive was around, heh...  So a little tweaking of the drive options should get things in order there. 

And wow, it's darkheim, good to see you around here again man!!
I appreciated the offers of assistance.