How to diagnose problems with a DVD drive?

To make your drive region free you need to flash new firmware onto it so that the drive itself will not check the region. This is knows as RPC1, search for rpc1.org. New drives won't read "out of region" DVDs.

I'm going to guess it's a quirk with the SATA chipset on your motherboard and this drive that Windows has sorted but Linux has not yet.

Please respond with some more information about your hardware, and perhaps update your BIOS. It might be initializing the hardware incorrectly.

Also, start with CDs that you know aren't non-standard or drm-ified. DVDs have region lock; non-standard CDs introduce errors or do things to freak out DVD drives (certain drives don't read DVD-RW's in certain modes as some sort of rudimentary anti-copying measure) but a standard Audio CD is usually a lowest common denominator.