My flippin' cd burner isnt working

EVERY time i try to burn some songs onto a CD with itunes, it just doesn't work. I'm trying to burn some songs on a CD to use in my car. If i drag the song files on to the CD itself, it doesn't work with my cd player in my car. It goes "Burning Disk.....Initializing" Then it goes "Burning Disk....Finishing" without actually burning the songs. Then the blank CD just automatically ejects itself and i get a pop up screen saying "The attempt to burn a disc failed. The device failed to respond properly, unable to recover or retry" I'm not sure if its a hardware problem or a software problem. I've had past problems of disc reading on different stuff like a Playstation 2, cd players, etc. and all i had to do then is clean the part where the laser comes out to read the cd with a cotton swab and rubbing alcohol. Would i have to do the same thing to my disk burner?

Oh and by the way, the cd drive can read cd's but not actually write them.

Any suggestions would help. thank you!

Message was edited by: abkang