Why does my Inspiron 1525 keep corrupting disks?

I have a 4 month old Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop. It has Vista on it.  I'm trying to format some cd-r's and cd-rw's to back up some pictures. I keep getting a message that the format could not be completed and that the disk has been corrupted. Could there be a problem with the CD drive on my computer? Could it be a hard drive issue? We were formatting the disks on another PC and using them, but now it won't even recognize those disks.  Does anyone have any thoughts on what this could be?  We've already had to have the hard drive replaced on this computer and are getting really frustrated.  Please help.