It's more or less up again (still have a few things to get running and a couple mysterious problems I haven't investigated yet). But compared to you my CD drive problems may be even less major. I have *one* working drive out of two, it just wasn't the right one so while annoying it was doable. I don't know what I would have done if it had only been one drive and not working. Plus the disk worked fine one it was able to be read.

Aren't macs supposed to be less prone to this kind of thing to make up for being harder to manage when they are a problem...or something like that?