Not that you shouldn't put a picoboot or whatever in there anyway, but it's getting increasingly common for the caps on the drive board to fail at this point, causing the disc drive to fail.
Yeah I suspect that you're right and it's a capacitor issue because if I leave the Cube running in its cute little BIOS-like thing for about 15 minutes then the optical drive starts working again. I suspect the caps or maybe the laser itself just needs to physically warm up.
