Cannot load/mount CDRom Drive

[NoOp]

I know that the answer will become obvious after replies, but I simply
cannot get Feisty 7.04 (ubuntu-desktop 2.6.20-16-386) to find and mount
the CDRom for an HP XE744. I've not pulled out the CDRom drive yet to
find out who it is made by, but it's a 48x that works just fine under
Knoppix.

So, I'd appreciate some help in pointing me in the right direction on
getting 7.04 to recognize the device and mount it.

I've tried noacpi in grub, fiddled with fstab until I'm blue in the
face, and I just can't get this CDRom drive to be recognized at all.

The HP XE744 is an old Pavilion model that comes with a 733Mhz Celeron
processor, Intel i810/82810 chipset, 48x CDRom, 20Gb hard drive (that
died and has been replaced with a 6.4Gb drive), and otherwise works just
fine.

Note: I pulled the drive from my old test server, so it initially was
looking for multiple CDRom drives etc.; those have been edited out of
the fstab and the fstab entry for the new CD is simply:
/dev/cdrom  /media/cdrom auto users,noauto,exec,ro 0 0
and yes there is a directory in /media/cdrom.

Can anyone point me in the right/obvious direction? This is the last
major thing that I need do before finishing bundling the system for some
old folks and getting them back online (ex their old WindowsME OS).