No CD/DVD drive in my Power Mac G4

I have a powermac g4 (FW800, I think), with the original combodrive and an LG "superdrive". Neither or these will read any formats of disks all of a sudden. I pop them in and wait for an icon to appear in my desktop or for iTunes to open the CD (for music CDs) or anything to recognize it, but nothing happens . Both drives were working last time I used them. What might give?
-thx

Some of the older PMac boxes were very particular about the brand of DVD drive used. Most were Pioneer and no others would work. Check in the System status to see the brand.

PHILIPS CDD5301:

Firmware Revision: Z1.4
Interconnect: ATAPI
Burn Support: Yes (Apple Shipped/Supported)
Cache: 8192 KB
Reads DVD: Yes
CD-Write: -R, -RW
Burn Underrun Protection CD: Yes
Write Strategies: CD-TAO, CD-Raw
Media: No

and

HL-DT-ST DVD-RAM GSA-H50N:

Firmware Revision: 1.00
Interconnect: ATAPI
Burn Support: Yes (Unsupported)
Profile Path: None
Cache: 2048 KB
Reads DVD: Yes
CD-Write: -R, -RW
DVD-Write: -R, -RAM, -RW, +R, +RW, +R DL
Burn Underrun Protection CD: Yes
Burn Underrun Protection DVD: Yes
Write Strategies: CD-TAO, CD-SAO, CD-Raw, DVD-DAO
Media: No



but neither seem to work with any disk.

You could try out patch burn, that may add support for that LG, but I have never heard of LG drives working on macs

Check the Finder preferences and ensure boxes are ticked.

It's not the preferences and it's not 'cause its LG.

Finder preferences are all checked and both drives have been working well for a while. And the apple drive should still work. Also, the system profiler says the apple drive can burn, but it also calls it a Combo Drive (I posted the system profiler above).

Have you had the machine apart lately as the cables sometimes are not quite fitted snugly and boy are they tight at times. No changes to master and slave settings at all? Next guess is the master drive may have to to optical heaven.

Now they both work intermittently, but the LG one works better than the apple combo drive. NVM, though. Problem seems to have solved itself with some fiddling,