Dead CD-ROM drive comes back to life

Just before January 24th, I had gotten my laptop updated to OS X (10.3) from OS 9.2 (I was probably the last holdout on system 9). Just after January 24th, the CD-ROM drive stopped working. It was always a little flaky and sluggish about pulling in a disk, but now, while you could insert the disk, it wouldn't mount. Even Disk Utility couldn't find it. The only way to eject it was with the manual eject button.

Not having a couple hundred bucks to spare right now for a replacement drive, I've been putting off doing anything about it. Then yesterday, just for the heck of it, I fed it the hardware diagnostic disk that came with the laptop. Lo and behold, the disk mounts, I reboot with it as the startup disk and run the diagnostics -- which unfortunately seem to test everything but the damned CD drive, but at least I know everything else is OK. So I'm hoping the drive has really come back to life permanently (or at least for the near future), because I do have some software to install. The only down side is that the original drive is just a CD/DVD drive, not a CD burner, and I had figured that at least replacing the drive would give me CD-R/RW capability. Still, $200 is $200.