Shouldn’t This Be A Kernel Panic?

Twice now my iBook G4 has lost track of it’s CD-Rom drive, and both times it comes back with a restart. But I know for a fact that any hardware like the CD-Rom drive or internal fans need a kernel extension to operate at all with the mac as a whole and while running OS X. And you all know that if a single kernel extension fails, you’re mac crashes and requires a forced restart. Also, both times this has happened about 15 to 20 days after a restart. Have any of you run into this issue? A quick way to know if your CD-Rom drive is visible is to go to “System Profiler (/Applications/Utilities/System Profiler.app) and choose “Disk Burning” is the software brings up a huge amount of info your fine, if it shows “No information found” your drive has been baked by your computer (really, when that happened to me the person who repaired it found black gunk in it) and you need to get it replaced, if the entire application starts to be unresponsive then you need to restart your mac to get the drive working again. A quick way to know how long your computer has been up without a restart is to go to Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app) and type “uptime” and it should tell you how long in days, hours, and minutes that your mac has been up for. Enjoy, Alex