help diagnose dvd/rw drive failure?

[anthony baldwin]

Greetings,

Earlier today I loaded in two CDs, one after another (Chau Soda / Soda 
Stereo)
into my dvd drive and ripped them with Grip and everything was beautiful
and groOvy.

Then, just moments ago, I loaded in a dvd that I had written to back up 
some materials
for my business, and, the drive failed to read the disk.
Then, it failed to eject the disk.
It did not respond to pushing the eject button, nor to
sudo eject.

I ran sudo eject -v and got the following:

tony at ool-45788232:~$ sudo eject -v
eject: using default device `cdrom'
eject: device name is `cdrom'
eject: expanded name is `/dev/cdrom'
eject: `/dev/cdrom' is a link to `/dev/hdc'
eject: `/dev/hdc' is not mounted
eject: `/dev/hdc' is not a mount point
eject: `/dev/hdc' is a multipartition device
eject: trying to eject `/dev/hdc' using CD-ROM eject command
eject: CD-ROM eject command failed
eject: trying to eject `/dev/hdc' using SCSI commands
eject: SCSI eject succeeded
tony at ool-45788232:~$


I force ejected the disk with a paperclip, and inserted a cd to see if 
the drive
would then respond, and it failed to read the cd (Maná - Amar es Combatir).
The device physically responded to neither the eject button or sudo 
eject, and
sudo eject -v gives me the above input.

I tried all kinds of & sudo mount /mnt/cdrom and sudo mount /media/cdrom
and sudo umount /media/cdrom and sudo umount /dev/hdc and whatever
else to get the drive to read, mount, unmount or eject,
etc., etc., all to no avail (no media found, regardless of what I shove 
in there...
not even the slice of bologna...okay, kidding about the bologna.)

Any ideas regarding why my dvd drive was working beautifully this afternoon,
and, now, is suddenly, for all appearances, dead,
or how I may further diagnose and/or resolve said issue?

Thanks in advance,
Tony

-- 
http://www.baldwinlinguas.com
Translation & Interpreting