Drives in ultrabay intermittently not recognised

[martinsj]

This problem is on an R32 (2658-MNG) but could apply to any machine so it's in this forum.

I have two ultrabay 2000 optical drives: a cd-rw/dvdrom drive and a dvd multiburner. Both drives definitely work as they have been tested in another machine.

The problem:
With either of the drives in place, the system hangs on the boot screen (with the IBM logo and boot device options) for anytime between 10 seconds and 5 minutes. It then loads WinXP (or Ubuntu linux), however, the optical drive is not recognised by either OS. The drives are only recognised once in every 10 or so startups. If the laptop is powered on without the optical drive in place there are no problems with startup.

I have tried the fix listed on the link below with no success.
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... 030#103030

Has anyone got any ideas on what might be wrong? Anything I can do to fix it?

Also, something (maybe) related: Sometimes at startup the numlock light stays on permanently, no matter how may times the key is pressed to toggle numlock (which works ok, just the light stays on). Kinda strange!

Thanks in advance!