Mounting external USB CD drive on Mac Book Pro

Hi all,
Hoping you can help.
My late 2008 MacBook Pro has been near bulletproof for me however the one weakspot (besides old OS) is the CD drive.
It can function, intermittantly, but not reliably enough for me to install my new Snow Leopard CD and upgrade the IOS.
So I have been trying to mount an external USB CD Drive - the MacBook Air Superdrive.
I can see it in the System Profiler, it draws 500 mA current, which apparently is all it requires.
However I cannot see it in Disk Utility.
I hear it move and power up on reboot, but the CD drive simply never mounts. It should mount, there is a CD I've accidentally left in there.
'tis very annoying.
Is there any way to get this external CD drive mounted properly?
Appreciate any assistance you can offer.
Many thanks...

Which drive?
In the built in drive, I can occasionally insert a CD and it will mount and read okay, but most of the time it simply spits the CD out - it also does this with CDs it has played happily with for a while (such as my Snow Leopard CD which I've been trying to install from ;P )
In the external drive, yes, there is a CD in there, however it was in there from when I had the CD drive plugged into my Mac mini server (server now broken, so ejecting CD is difficult - that's a whole other kettle of fish...)
I don't understand why Apple System Profiler can see the external CD drive, and it reports no issues, but yet Disk Utility does not.
Do I need to find a way of disabling the built in drive somehow before OS X will recognise a different CD drive?

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