LinuxQuestions.org - U-Dapper boot hangs on "installing hardware drivers"

U-Dapper, kver 2.6.15-27-i686 hangs at "installing hardware drivers" ... reboot into recovery mode, and it gets further: to "Starting Enterprise Volume Management System" ... but there is an error in the "hardware drivers" part which takes 5-10mins to work through; vis:

hdc: lost interrupt
hdc: request sense failure: status 0x51 {DriveReady SeekComplete Error}
hdc: request sense failure: status 0x20 {LastFailedSense 0x02}
hdc: CHECK for good STATUS ...after a long wait...[Failed]

Last thing that was done with hdc (DVD/CD combo drive) was burning the edgy-desktop CD.

After reboot, grepped for messages about hdc:

Code:

$ dmesg | grep hdc

[17179573.648000]    ide1: BM-DMA at 0x2008-0x200f, BIOS settings: hdc:DMA, hdd:pio

[17179575.204000] hdc: UJDA770 DVD/CDRW, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive

[17179575.800000] hdc: ATAPI 24X DVD-ROM CD-R/RW drive, 2048kB Cache, UDMA(33)

[17179587.664000] hdc: CHECK for good STATUS

[17179587.688000] hdc: CHECK for good STATUS

$ dmesg | grep error

$ dmesg | grep ERROR

The machine is acer aspire 3003LC (laptop) - it's in the HCL.

*** I managed to boot by inserting a blank CD - on the assumption that something was stopping the drive being "seen" properly. I got the idea because the desktop CD would boot fine. I have not repeated the experiment yet to see if this is consistent, or just a coincedence.

Last time this happened, I didn't investigate so closely, but assumed that there was an unclean shutdown previous. That time there was a successful boot to recovery from where I was able to issue a shutdown command. The reboot after that went without a hitch. But this time, could not boot into recover (as noted).

There are many threads in LQ with this sort of error associated with ASUS motherboards.
I suspect the drive is packing in - anyone experience similar?