I've got a Gateway MT3423 laptop with TS-L632D CD/DVD Burner. The optical drive has never been great shakes, rather noise and slow to rip CDs, glad I don't often. But the last few months, I think since I upgraded (using apt, not clean install) to Intrepid but I'm not suer, it has not worked with DVDs at all. They do not play, they cannot be ripped, put one in and type lsdvd and it simply says "No Media" after a few minutes of spinning the drive.

It still works for reading and writing CDs and does so acceptably, but commercial or burned video DVDs do not. I cannot burn DVDs either, it doesn't recognize blanks. I have a Data DVD burned on DVD5 media, somewhere, but haven't tried it. I also haven't tried to boot this machine into Vista to see if it works---I haven't booted Vista in months an would like to keep it that way, been thinking of wiping it.

Well, so my question is what is the matter with my drive, or how do I found out? and how do I fix it?

Here's output from lswh on the drive.

Code:
  *-cdrom
       description: DVD-RAM writer
       product: CD/DVDW TS-L632D
       vendor: TSSTcorp
       physical id: 1
       bus info: scsi@1:0.0.0
       logical name: /dev/cdrom
       logical name: /dev/cdrw
       logical name: /dev/dvd
       logical name: /dev/dvdrw
       logical name: /dev/scd0
       logical name: /dev/sr0
       version: GA06
       capabilities: removable audio cd-r cd-rw dvd dvd-r dvd-ram
       configuration: ansiversion=5 status=nodisc