Discs loaded into SATA optical drive are not detected
 

For a while now (perhaps), any CD or DVD I put into my SATA optical drive, whether it is blank or not, will not read. This problem started a couple of months ago when I was using Arch Linux x86_64, but then a week ago I switched to x86 Ubuntu 9.04, and the optical drive still doesn't detect anything that is loaded into it. It detects and reads discs during boot-up just fine (otherwise my Ubuntu livecd wouldn't work).

Could someone point me to a solution for this problem, since it is apparently affecting multiple distros?

Did you switch your controller's BIOS setting; say from AHCI to SATA? Has it ever worked?

Yes, it has worked in the past. And no, I haven't changed the controller's BIOS settings. If that were the case, then wouldn't it fail to work during bootup?

I rebooted my computer this morning (for the first time in the week I've had Ubuntu installed) and checked the BIOS. Doesn't have an option like what you described. However, after starting up my computer, I discovered that the optical drive was working again.

And now its happening again :-/

Can you post the output of '/sbin/lspci -vv' just the part about the SATA or IDE controller.

So you're sure there are no options for the SATA controller in the BIOS, usually there's at least a PATA option.

I haven't used SATA DVD drives, but I've had several PATA drives go out which started off as intermittent failures.