DVD drives mysteriously absent after lucid re-install

[skewray]

I recently re-installed lucid on a machine with two working DVD writers, one SATA, the other IDE. After the re-install, neither drive appears to be recognized. Putting an blank CD into either used to cause a pop-up that would ask me if I want to run k3b, but now it doesn't. If I use an external USB DVD writer, I do get that pop-up. Sadly my external USB DVD writer apparently writes unreadable disks, so it is not part of a long-term solution.

Any suggestions?

Brian

[skewray]

bump

[rotave]

Have you tried putting a cd/dvd in one of the drives (can be a blank cd/dvd) while running Ubuntu and then rebooting the machine. Upon reboot the cd/dvd drive might be recognised. I have this problem sometimes and this "fixes" it.

[skewray]

It turns out that it you have two dvd drives, the stupid installer makes one /dev/dvd1 and the other /dev/dvd2. It doesn't make any links at all for /dev/dvd, so virtually no programs on the system can find the dvd drives. Making a new link in /dev doesn't fix the problem, since /dev is recreated every time the machine boots. I suppose the solution is to make a link in rc.local.