I had the exact issue described.
I found a post on the launchpad that said can��t boot properly without adding irqpoll to the boot options, tried that and it fixed my issue right away
so in /boot/grub/menu.lst I added irqpoll to the kernel line
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.20-15-generic root=UUID=48c5a348-eb39-4171-8531-671a49fdb75b ro quiet splash irqpoll
now my lite on cdrw shows up and works properly. I am not sure what performance hit this causes if any but it certainly fixed the issue.
