When I've had burn problems like this, the problem has been the cdrom drive I've been reading from, not my HDD.
Make sure you've enables S.M.A.R.T. tech for your hard drive in bios, if available, and then run at least the HDD Diagnostics from Windows, unless you have better 3rd party one like Norton Systemworks.
Once you know the HDD is bad or good, you can start looking at CR-Rom issues. (I put the HDD thing first because if it dies, you're screwed NOW, if the CD-Rom fails, you can recover from that easy.)
Good luck, let me know what you find.