ive got a bunch of burned cd-r's off my mate and my xbox refuses to read them. tried putting them into my pc and this also doesnt work. is there any way i can get them to work, or even just to back them up onto my hard drive somehow?

what do they have?

you probably got the thomson dvd drive that doesnt like cd-r`s try to burn an image of them and copy them to some dvd-r`s or some cd-rw`s

the drive doesnt like cdrws either, is there method that doesnt involve a dvd writer?

The Xbox DVD-Rom drives are very picky about what kinds are media are used on them.

Thompson usually works best with DVD-R media rather then CD-R or CD-RW.

Ofcourse I recommend picking up some Taiyo Yuden brand writable CD's they are usually of best quality and work well on most Xbox DVD-ROM drives.