ATA DVD-ROM failure

Hi everyone,
I haven't been using my DVD-ROM in my Fujitsu/Siemens S-1540 series laptop
with FreeBSD for some time, so I don't know how long this problem has
been. (I used it quite a bit when installing, so it hasn't always been
like this) When I boot up or do a "atacontrol reinit 0" I get

ata0: resetting devices ..
ata0-slave: FAILURE - ATA_IDENTIFY status=51<READY,DSC,ERROR> error=4<ABORTED>
done

Does anyone recognize this or have any idea why this happens or how I can
debug it further to get an idea?

Cheers

   Nik