Hardware Talk :: cdrom going bad?

I went to boot off of the 1.5 cd today and found that it was booting super slow, like 10 minutes to boot. It will finally boot all the way up if I let it but it just takes a long time. It had done this a couple months ago when trying to boot a previous version but I ended up formatting anyway, and when I reinstalled it was fine.
I also tried booting the 1.4 cd and dariks boot & nuke with both of them also booting very, very slow. My question is, is this a problem with my cdrom or could something else cause this? It is pretty old, something like a 16x drive but I hate to replace it if it is something else. Thanks in advance for any help/suggestions.

If the CD boots fine on all your other boxen, then it's probably thr cdrom. They do die after a while.

New CD suckers should only set you back $10 or $15. Even for a 52xer.

original here.