Greetings, I rarely post here, because I am not in your league, technically speaking. But I have not been able to read or write optical media since I upgraded from Ubuntu Studio 8.04 to 9.10 some months ago. I have posted all over the place, and filed a bug report in Launchpad (#544772), shown people all kinds of terminal reports, loaded some kernel modules--sorry I can't document it here, it's spread all over the place. In the end, still no drive. Last weekend I did a fresh install of 10.04, just to see if anything changed. The only difference is there is no longer even a menu item for CD or DVD drives (though there is one for floppy drives[!]). I installed from a DVD, and at first boot, the drive it had just installed from, no longer existed as far as the system could tell. I can boot live CDs, and if I boot generic Ubuntu from a flash drive, I can use the CD/DVD drive. Can this be fixed, or is this just obsolete hardware? Is there a better distro for this drive? What information do you folks need to help me figure this out? I don't like having a multimedia production machine that can't even play a CD, much less save projects to one. Thanks, Paul in Seattle