Matshita UJDA730 DVD/CD not detected in Sony Vaio PCG-R505GL

A friend has a Sony Vaio Laptop, model PCG-R505GL. It has a CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive, Matshita UJDA730 as the only CD drive.

When trying to boot Knoppix, there's a problem detecting that CD drive (from which I'm booting from), and therefore Knoppix says that it "can't find the Knoppix filesystem, sorry." and drops me to the mini-shell.

I quite don't remember the exact messages. Some info: I couldn't find any hdb: <MODEL>, hdc: <MODEL> or hdd: <MODEL> in the kernel messages near the hda: <MODEL> for the hard disk (which DOES appear). ide0: is correctly detected.

I tried failsafe, expert, failsafe hdb=ide-scsi, hdb=scsi, hdb=ide-cd (which I don't know if it comes with Knoppix, hehe) and the same with hdc, and other combinations of failsafe and expert and normal "knoppix" of course, with the exact same result.

The BIOS is an Award and I set the IDE channel options to Auto.

The CD is correct: I tried it in three other computers without problems.

Any ideas? Need any particular info?

Thanks in advance.

Is it an IDE drive ? You may be able to find out from window's device manager.

Yes, it is detected in Windows. Yes, it is an IDE drive.

I was looking around, and looks like the kernel needs an ACPI patch to fix an IRQ steering conflict in order to make it work. Unfortunately, in a Live CD configuration this is more difficult. I was wondering if it can be supported in a near future.