Perhaps a dumb question...

Hi gang!
Sorry for the length of this...
I'm hesitant to ask here for fear of starting yet another Mike Richter / smh
fight, (heheheh)
but I have some weird stuff going on with my CR-RW and I'm afraid that the
dirve is bad.
I'm on a P3 1 Ghz 256 Megs Ram. Win 98SE
The CD-RW is a ummmmmm dare I say it...
LG CED 8080B (not so lucky gold star eh?)
I use the Hotburn that came with the drive 2 or 3 years ago.
I upgraded the firmware to the latest release about a year ago.
I downloaded the lastest version of the software as well.
I can drag and drop some files to to the window and a CD-RW burns fine.
I can run the tests fine as well.
But when running the CD copy feature - even on an old music CD, everything
buffers fine,
but I get the same error for CD-r's and CD-RW's:

Error writing to the disc.
I/O error (aa/04/09/00) - Track following error
Error - operation was not successful.

I made about a dozen coasters so far ^$(^$%(^$*%$*

I checked comp.publish.cdrom.hardware as well as here, and found only one
thread with the track following error issue addressed.
smh, you mentioned a clean and lube of the drive - I've had broken drives
apart b4 so it shouldnt be a problem, but I've never done a "clean & lube"
other than putting the little brushy cd in to clean the drive - is it
simple?
or can I really f-up the drive?
Perhaps I should bite the bullet and get a new CDRW from Tiger or elsewhere
online?
Let me know what you guys think - Thanks in advance!
Please don't fight. I hope I don't cause a problem.
Dohhh winces as he hits the send button.....
~~~
Some days you're the dog.... Some days you're the hydrant !