Dissapearing re-appearing CD-Rom drive

I hope somebody can give my some advice. My problem is that my cd-rom drive is not always recognised by the BIOS when my machine starts up, I have the bios set to auto configure. When this happens it does not appear in the Debian startup screen. and when I try to mount it I get a message like i

re: slashdot poll

I thought I would input my couple of pence worth to this discussion. I am very much a Linux newbie but I am not exactly an idiot when it comes to computers. I have been using computers for 10 years going back to my humble XT. I have recently installed RH5.1, SuSE 5.3 and Deb 2.0 and I would lik