[mythtv-users] no DVD drive found?

[f-myth-users at media.mit.edu]

    > Date: Mon, 16 Nov 2009 18:02:30 -0700
    > From: Greg Woods <greg at gregandeva.net>

    > On Mon, 2009-11-16 at 19:01 -0500, greg wrote:
    > > On Mon, 2009-11-16 at 16:52 -0700, Greg Woods wrote:
    > >  the system is
    > > > not finding my DVD drive. 
    > > Try this and see if it shows up..  sudo lshw -C disk

    > Nope, but that's not surprising since it's not in dmesg either.
    > The other four disks on the system (four SATA 1TB's for recordings and
    > videos) and the system disk (400GB IDE) do show up and those are all
    > working. The evidence says the BIOS sees the optical drive (it even
    > identifies it) but the Linux kernel does not.

I don't believe you ever told us the model number of the drive.
Have you tried searching for that model number and "linux" or
something like that to see if others reported similar problems?
Maybe the drive doesn't follow standards correctly.