My CD-ROM drive won't mount and I can't boot any disk on it.

Whenever there is a disk in the drive, it just flashes yellow rapidly.

It won't mount itself and I can't mount it manually.

It won't boot, and I have checked the BIOS to varify that it is setup to try to boot the CD-ROM before it tries to but the hard drive.

I understand your problem(You are saying that basically you can't boot into the computer through your CDROM drive).So could you please tell me about the CD drive type(is it scsi), your computer specification(so that I could know about BIOS) and what (if any) error message you are getting? Are you able to use the CD from Windows?

How old is the cd-rom drive? SOme of the older drves need specific drivers to be able to boot.

I guess I didn't explain in my initial post, that this is a drive that I have been using for a couple of years and it is only just now that has stopped working.

During boot, the scan for hard drives and CD-ROM drives takes a bit longer than usual, but the CD-ROM drive is detected. The CD-ROM drive is on primary master and my hard drive is on secondary master. Then it tells me it is trying to boot the CD-ROM, which takes a few seconds, but then it just starts GRUB, without any errors, as if no disk was in the drive. I have tried many disks that I know work.

Oddly, Ubuntu has made a place called /media/cdrom0 that is always present, but, back when it was still mounting, it would mount the drive as /media/cdrom1. I only have one CD-ROM drive.

CD-ROM: Artec WRA-WA48 1.00
It is connected via an IDE cable, so I guess that means it is not SCSI.

BIOS: ver. 6.00PG

The only error messages I could find where from `dmesg` "cdrom: open failed" and from trying to mount manually "mount: No medium found".

I do not have Windows installed.

I believe the date detected in my device manager is 20020308, unless that number means something else.

Update: I have borrowed another CD-ROM drive and, plugged in exactly as the other drive was, it mounts and works just fine. Does this mean that my WRA-WA48 CD-ROM drive has died?

If the drive worked previously and has stopped working, but another drive works... I'd say your old drive is applying for retirement.