Although this might not completely answer your question, I managed to swap optical drives between a Toshiba Tecra 710CDT and a Toshiba Satellite 315CDS. Both of the drives were Toshiba-branded, the main difference is the Tecra had a 16x CD-ROM drive and the Satellite had a 20x CD-ROM drive. I've never had the courage to test a non-Toshiba optical drive on either laptop so I'm not sure if I got lucky or these laptops really are brand sensitive when it comes to optical drives.
For what it's worth, I believe some older laptop optical drives had a jumper switch for master/slave/cable select just like desktop drives, maybe it needs a drive with that switch set to a specific position? (this is just a hunch, this may or may not be the case)
weldum wrote:my gateway laptop has the same problem, i can use a ide dvd drive but the bios will not boot from there, making 9x os install not worth the hassle, despite being the only os that makes it shine
That sounds a lot like what happens when I use a non-HP certified optical drive in my HP e-PC C10. The BIOS will refuse to allow booting from a different optical drive, but it'll still work in Windows and boot floppies with CD-ROM drivers. There are boot floppies with the ability to boot from the optical drive regardless of BIOS limitations (provided your machine can boot from floppy drives - either USB, internal, or proprietary external - of course).