Drive issue- flickering

[messym]

I am would like to request someone's assistance. I have noticed an issue with my pc for the past few days. Prior to this, my pc functioned properly. My pc is a 2.6ghz p4, 1GB pc3200, intel D875PBZ motherboard, running windows xp prof. edition. The system is set up with a floppy drive, 2 EIDE HDD, and 2 optical drives. The 2 HDD are on one ribbon and the 2 optical drives are on the other. The drives are LG GSA-4081B (DVD-RW) and LG GCE-8525B (CD-RW). The jumpers are set to master on the DVD drive and slave on the CD-RW drive as advised by LG. However, the green light on the CD-RW drive flickers non-stop upon rebooting the pc every 2-3x I turn it on. The pc sees the drives, loads the Windows XP Prof. screen then goes black never making it to the normal windows screen. I have to reboot the pc a 2nd time to get it to load normally. Both optical drives are updated with latest firmware and my pc contains all critical windows updates. I also checked the ribbon and jumpers for loose connections and everything is ok. I ran McAfee Virusscan, Ad-aware, and SpyBot Search & Destroy on the pc to make sure this isn't a virus and the scans all came up clean. Lastly, no new software has been installed recently that may have caused a conflict other than virus updates to McAfee. The CD-RW drive is operational and works fine when the system boots up correctly. Does anyone know what may be causing this flickering issue? I had this issue about a year ago, did a OS reinstall and the problem went away for a while. I don't want to take that path again if I don't have to. I would appreciate anyones help in this area.