I've got an internal 5.25" DVD burner plugged into one of those Chinese SATA to USB boxes so I can connect it to a laptop. It's always worked flawlessly, like a new drive.
Tonight I plugged it in, turned it on, nothing. It showed up, but it refused to eject, and the status light was solid green. I stuck a pin in the manual eject and moved the tray around, didn't change anything.
And THEN my dumbass self realized the power wasn't connected. The only power it was receiving was over USB 2.0, just enough to power the LED and not much else.
So I plugged in the power brick, turned it back on, and... The exact same thing. No activity. Refusing to eject. I manually pulled the tray back out and closed it firmly. Nada. Not even the sound of a tray trying to eject. And now it doesn't even show up as a proper disc drive on my laptop, just as a "generic USB drive".
Did my accidentally underpowering this drive fucking kill it? How is that even possible? I suppose it makes sense the manufacturer wouldn't expect this internal DVD drive to receive less power than it needs, but even so, how could underpowering it kill the thing? Or am I stupid and there's some hard reset process I need to do to get this thing back up and running? I'm baffled.