I've just tried a quick test after enabling most of the PATA drivers under
the libata section including the Jmicron driver (basically everything except
those labelled "highly experimental"). As far as I can tell the
CDROM/DVDROM is still not detected even with all these built into the
kernel. Maybe I do need one of those "highly experimental" drivers.
Also, it's unrelated to this problem, but you should check the BIOS settings for the SATA controller - you really want to get the controller into AHCI mode for best performance.
I've often wondered how the BIOS descriptions correlate with the modes the
controller ends up in. I've always gone for things like "enhanced" or
"SATA" or "native" (the exact string of course being dependent on the BIOS
writer's mood on the day). This seems to work out OK in practice. How
can you tell from the Linux boot messages that the controller is in AHCI
mode - is it as simple as looking for AHCI driver messages? In this case
the
scsi0 : ata_piix
scsi1 : ata_piix
indicate that things are suboptimal I assume.