I'm fishing in the vast brain bank of flashkit here for some help.

My laptop, (dell inspiron 500e) has decided it won't read any optical media other then dvd anymore.

Normally this wouldn't bother me as such BUT it's a pain in the ass if you need to boot from cd or you need to upgrade any o/s.

So why would a device do that, and is there a fix for it other then buying some very exspensive proprietary part.

I really want to go slackware but not with my junk like this.