Help- Optical Disk Drive not recognised!

Hi, having a nightmare problem with my macbook- any help would be much appreciated!


I'm using a new (late 2010) macbook pro, and today it suddenly forgot it has a disk drive.

It's no longer showing up in Disk Utility, and the eject button does nothing (there's a CD in there).


I was in the middle of burning a CD in iTunes, which crashed. I force quit, restarted, then had to troubleshoot as iTunes wouldn't open- saying I hadn't permission to open the library. I deleted the library file, then started a new one, which solved the iTunes problem and allowed me to open the program. Then I noticed the problem with the disk drive, and nothing I've tried has helped.


Any ideas?


Thanks!

Typical- I've been at this all day and as soon as I post here the problem gets solved.

For the sake of anyone who finds this and is having the same problem- the strangest solution worked:

I re-booted, and on startup rapidly pressed the eject button until the CD ejected. Now the drive is recognised.

Weird- I didn't think a solution akin to button-bashing would be successful...