Not Recognizing CD Drive?

[rokrin]

I'm running a Dell Inspiron 6400 with Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope). It doesn't seem to be recognizing my CD drive at all which is a problem as I have some things I need to install via disk. It was working fine before, I could see the CD icon on my desktop when the Ubuntu CD was in the drive, but I haven't used the drive for 2 weeks and now it's not seeing the drive at all.

Help?

[123456789123456789123456]

ok, You said it was working before, I assume that it was working after you upgraded to 9.04?

try this, enter BIOS, is the cd drive listed there?

Try incerting the cd, and restarting the computer, enter the boot menu, and choose to boot from cd drive
does it work.

When you incert a cd, does the drive light appear, and do you hear the drive spin up?

It could be a problem with the Ubuntu installation, or it could be drive failure.

[rokrin]

CD drive light stays on but randomly goes off and I'm unable to open it after that. Doesn't appear in the boot menu but the light is on.

It's weird because it literally was working just fine not 5 days ago.

e: I've removed the optical drive, I'm taking a peek at it now. Hopefully it's not hardware failure because Dell's never very happy to find out you installed something that wasn't their crap on their computers.

[123456789123456789123456]

I hate to tell you this, the drive is dead
it has power, but it is obviously not working properly. Drives go out all the time, there is really no time limit on them, I have had drives that are 30 years old, and still work perfectly, where there are drives that were just bought from a store, and die in one week.
you need to replace the drive.