SATA Plextor DVD writer... experiences ?

[Vincent Trouilliez]

My dad gave generously gave me his lovely Plextor DVD writer, a
PX-712SA, because it's a SATA interface and won't work on hiw WinXP box.
He tried the motherboard's built-in SATA controller, then tried with an
add-on PCI card, but it still would not work. 

So today I am trying it on my machine (different motherboard). The PCI
SATA controller doesn't seem to detect the drive at boot, but somehow
windows detect both the SATA controller AND the drive, and you can see
it in Explorer. It can read CD's, but when you try to write to it, the
machine hangs, need to kill Explorer.

Under Warty, SATA controller is detected as an "Silicon Image Sil 3112,
ASUS A7N8X", but the drive is not detected.

Under Hoary it's better, controller is detected, and the drive is
detected too, and an 'sr0' device is created accordingly.

However when I try to read a disc, it says that it can't mount it
because it's not a block device, and when I try to burn a CD, the kernel
displays some errors, seems it's having problems talking to the drive,
or understanding what it says.

Given that both Windows and Ubuntu show the same problem (detected
properly, but won't read, and gives errors when trying to write), can I
reasonably think that the drive is faulty and that if I ask for a new
one (it's still well under warranty) it's likely to work ?
Or are there known H/W issues that will keep this drive from working no
matter what ?
Has anyone got this drive, or maybe another SATA Plextor CD writer, to
work, in Ubuntu, or at all really, ie in Windows ?

I gathered on this list that there could be problems mixing "normal" IDE
devices and SATA stuff, but I my two hard drives and multi-boot etc work
fine, it's just the SATA drive that has problems.

Any things I should do to get this SATA drive to work in Ubuntu ?
Is it "blacklisted" or something ?

That is, I would like to try a few things, before I resort to sending it
for repair/replacement, as I will have to pay for shipping and probably
wait several weeks for it to come back ! :-/


Thanks for sharing any thoughts...

--
Vince