dvd drive stopped working

[David Fletcher]

At 14:32 19/03/2008, you wrote:
>Yo,
>I finally took my machine down and opened it today - I reseated the cables in
>the DVD drive and went into the BIOS and it shows the drive is there.
>
>When I boot Gutsy it takes *forever* and reports "hdb: drive not ready for
>command" over and over.
>
>This happened quite suddenly a few weeks ago and I have not had the 
>use of the
>drive since then. I was hoping that pushing all the cables in again would fix
>things, but nope...
>
>Is there any new issue with dvd/cd drives that I missed? Perhaps 
>some tweak or
>module or something? Or is my drive toast?

I've had a couple of them just die on me, even though they don't get 
used much and they were not from cheap sounding manufacturers either 
shall we say.

Thing is with these, they've become so cheap that it's hardly worth 
fooling around with them - if it's stopped working my advice would be 
to just order a new one with SATA if your motherboard supports it, 
and toss the old one in the recycling skip when the new one is 
installed and working.

The only Gutsy issue that I have with these, is that the K3B function 
to verify writing to a DVD doesn't work, but I think everybody has 
that problem. Maybe it will be fixed in Hardy.

Dave