Hello

i have the same problem alsoon lenovo ideapad y710 with optiarc dvd

i have temporary solve this problem by replacing grub by lilo

my feeling is that bug is comming from acpi handling

with lilo at boot time acpi is not enabled ,lilo make this after,
and DVD is normaly detected

with grub at boot time acpi is enabled dvd is not seen

if at boot time you add keyword acpi=off on boot line dvd is detected, but it is bad for battery life because you have't acpi

And I'm sure it is not about BIOS or Firmware. Because if I only install windows in the ideapad , DVD-RW do works.

Updating the BIOS and Firmware does not fix the problem.

Please look for updates BIOS or Firmware for your device. GRUB legacy and GRUB 2 uses primarliy BIOS to access devices. On GRUB 2 you can also try to use ata.mod instead of biosdisk.mod. This will cause GRUB 2 communicate directly with ATA controller.

I have a Lenovo IdeaPad Y710 with an Optiarc DVD+/-R/RW drive, and using GRUB (both GRUB2 and legacy, for what it's worth) does something to the drive that makes renders it inoperable.  Booting Ubuntu 8.04.1 using GRUB2 makes it so that there is not even a device entry for the drive, and nothing will automount either (CD or DVD).  There has been quite a lot of discussion about this in some of the forums (Debian and Ubuntu), and it happens with other vendors' drives as well (Nec comes to mind, and there have been others in the discussions).

The drive does work - I can boot from it using any of the live CDs, and it works when I boot directly into Vista by changing the boot order for the hard drives (I have two).

One other symptom is that using GRUB to boot the PC causes the drive activity light to stay on constantly until I open the DVD drive; the light then works normally, but the DVD drive never does.