Q-tip (cotton swap) + rubbing alcohol or isopropyl alcohol. While off of course. There is a little hole to push a paper clip into to eject the drive bay on many devices. Or $(eject -r) aka cupholder.exe (old win95 joke thing). Although mostly for older drives if your household has a smoker and/or pets. Or you live in a dusty climate (desert / iraq / manufacturing plant / ...). Got a bit more life out of a few drives that way.

But if you burn disks, they tend to burn out after 100-ish discs +/- ofc. And blank media can be questionable in a lot of cases. I had one blank that was so lightly coated it was almost transparent. So if you burn and your software supports it, verify. Don't just assume it was successful, even though everything else "said" it was successful. And if your store keeps the blank media in a UV exposure area (window), they might be worthless at the point of purchase.

I started digging into the model/manufacturer to try and see what others have done. I tried a couple of approaches that seemed to work for them, without success. I checked my pile of old parts and dug out another DVD burner to try. Low and behold, it worked just fine.

I'm assuming there must be a hardware failure for first other drive that coincidentally happened between the last use and after the Ubuntu upgrade.

Thanks for the help all.