Lenovo 3000 N200 laptop and "NO" cd/dvd rom drive solved

[Humidicutis]

I have just purchased a Lenovo 3000 N200 laptop which came with a pre-installation of Vista Home Basic which was immediately removed. The laptop is now running Daryna very happily with one problem: it refuses to read the cd/dvd rom drive. The curious situation is that at bootup, the drive is recognised by the laptop and my running installation of Daryna was rapidly installed from a dvd...........However once the installation is complete, the drive cannot be opened when a cd or dvd is inserted. The fstab file shows that the drive is there and I have seen this same problem described in other reader forums:

http://expert.mandriva.com/question/102733

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=648185&page=2

The second url on the ubuntu forum shows exactly what is happening to me. I note that there was no final resolution for that ubuntu forum discussion. USB works fine, so I could use an external drive if absolutely necessary, but that seems a pity when the drive is already there.

Can anybody suggest a solution ?

Final note: I suspect the problem is to do with the fact that the Lenovo 3000 runs a SATA drive system.........but that is only a hypothesis

[Husse]

Is the DVD SATA?

[Humidicutis]

I honestly do not know for sure, but I can guess that it is. All I can tell you is that the hdd definitely is SATA and that the dvd rom drive appears to be detected as SATA in the fstab file becauses it is shown as:

/dev/scd0

Hope that helps.

[Husse]

SATA DVD seems to be a problem to an extent
The best I found looking for a solution was
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=4381230
but that's no good....
It's also difficult to search for this, too many irrelevant hits

[Humidicutis]

For anyone who has been viewing this particular problem, I have been in touch with Lenovo Australia and also looked at some of their manuals. It is looking more and more as if this is a very special case of a hidden partition with highly specialised drivers for the cd/dvd r/rw drive. Of course it was wiped during the hdd format.............if so (and I am not sure yet - so I may be maligning both Lenovo and Microsoft), it is one of the more disgusting ways of producing hardware that is almost Windows specific. I shall pursue the matter further.

I now have a usb2 external cd/dvd r/rw drive attached and as far as the computer is concerned, it runs perfectly. One very interesting matter arose when I was testing the PCLinuxOS distribution using the external drive. While the external drive was being used and the OS was live from the external drive, the laptop's internal drive was fully detected and could be used without any problems at all.......And yes, my eyebrows rose over that little effort. Once PCLinuxOS was installed from the external drive however, the internal drive was no longer available...........sigh................

[Husse]

What can I say - I suspect that there's more of this "hidden" crap that causes unexplained problems....

[Guest]

The final solution is to remove that particular LG drive altogether. I currently have a temporary unit in place that came out of a small dvd player. It took a little bit of adjusting of mounting brackets and the front plate but what I was able to show was that once the original optical drive was removed, the laptop could detect and use a normal optical drive.......The current "patch drive" is able to read both cd's and dvd's.....Am not as yet able to deal with movies for some reason, but at least it is now behaving more or less like a normal internal drive. The problem is purely to do with the LG GMA 4082N drive that this laptop comes with as its optical drive. From what I can see on the web, this drive is also causing considerable trouble elsewhere..So problem resolved......all based on what appears to be the faulty behaviour of an LG optical drive.