Optical drive disappears on MacBook (2,1)

I have an ancient MacBook (2,1), and several minutes after booting, the optical drive seems to become invisible to applications. That is, when using dolphin or an app such as k3b, no optical drive is detected. If some medium is inserted, it cannot be ejected, even by running "eject" from the terminal. However, lsscsi does turn up the drive, and even gives it a mount point at /dev/sr0. It can also be found in the YaST Hardware Information module. This is a bit of a mystery to me. To deepen the mystery even further, the drive *can* be found by applications for the first minute or two after a fresh boot and login. Are there any suggestions as to how to proceed on troubleshooting this? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Here's some of the output of Hardware Info:
SysFS ID: /class/block/sr0
SysFS BusID: 0:0:0:0
SysFS Device Link: /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1f.1/ata1/host0/target0:0:0/0:0:0:0
Hardware Class: cdrom
Model: "HL-DT-ST DVDRW GWA4080MB"
Vendor: "HL-DT-ST"
Device: "DVDRW GWA4080MB"
Revision: "BE38"
Driver: "ata_piix", "sr"
Driver Modules: "ata_piix"
Device File: /dev/sr0 (/dev/sg0)
Device Files: /dev/sr0, /dev/cdrom, /dev/cdrw, /dev/disk/by-path/pci-0000:00:1f.1-scsi-0:0:0:0, /dev/dvd
Device Number: block 11:0 (char 21:0)
Features: CD-R, CD-RW, DVD, DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD-R DL, DVD+R, DVD+RW, DVD+R DL, DVD+RW DL, BD, BD-R, BD-RE, HD, HD-R, HD-RW, MRW, MRW-W
Drive status: no medium
Config Status: cfg=yes, avail=yes, need=no, active=unknown
Attached to: #26 (IDE interface)
Drive Speed: 24

I would be happy to provide any other information that would be helpful. For example, if you need any logs, please point me in the direction of the appropriate ones to submit.