Dear ALUG,

My DVD/CD-RW combined drive on my laptop has stopped working!

I'm using Mandrake 9.1 (and Windows XP sometimes) on a PIII laptop system.

Neither operating system will recognise the drive at all. The hardware itself is unlikely to be faulty as it makes all the usual noises and flashes when you put a disc in it. The sym link /dev/cdrom is missing as are the devices /dev/cdroms/cdrom0 (though the directory /dev/cdroms still exists) and /dev/scd0. (I also tried running cdrecord --scanbus out of interest and this reported that there were no suitable devices).

The problem first occured when I went to put a CD in the drive and, as it opened, the machine just re-booted itself. I decided not to let it do an integrity check (Mandrake runs fsck) and it booted normally until init informed me that it had found a new device: /dev/scd0 and asked me if I wanted to run config tools for it, OK I said. It finished booting but it had made no difference.

If anyone has any ideas then please let me know.

Thanks very much,

Richard