Okay, could anyone please clarify the terms they're using here?
CD-RW stands for 'Compact Disc - Re-Writable'.
A 'burner' or 'cd burner' is just another 'slang' term for a cd-writeable or cd-rewritable drive.
A CD-ROM drive is an optical drive that can only read CD's, not write them.
You can read CDs just fine in a CD-R or CD-RW drive. In fact, many bargain PC's only come with one optical drive, a CD-RW. You can copy discs with them by first copying the data to the hard drive.
Now, honestly, I have no clue what you guys are talking about.
And Concept, your drive didn't melt your disc, you did. It's called user error, if you read the manual you could probably figure out what you did wrong.