Hotplugging DVD-drive on laptop

Right. On top of my wishlist for my Dell 510m is a fully working Ubuntu install. And I must say, Feisty is looking very good in that respect: excellent wifi roaming, suspend to disk works brilliantly (no more annoying missing mouse cursor after resume, fixed), and I can live with manually installing 915fix for my intel-graphics to get my native resolution (hey, we can't all have it in the standard install, can we...).
Now for the one remaining leetle problem: hotswapping the DVD-drive for my second battery-pack. As I'm on the road a lot, you can see where that comes in handy. Ideally, I would like it to appear/reappear just like a USB-stick or something.
Edgy continually crashed on me when trying this. So I had to live without my drive. Feisty on the other hand, doesn't crash, one way or another:

Scenario 1 - Boot with DVD-drive in. Drive works. Eject it and behold:

Mar 20 20:49:26 dell kernel: [ 86.460000] res 00/00:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/00 Emask 0x2 (HSM violation)
Mar 20 20:49:26 dell kernel: [ 86.460000] ata2: soft resetting port
Mar 20 20:49:27 dell kernel: [ 86.772000] ata2: failed to recover some devices, retrying in 5 secs
Mar 20 20:49:32 dell kernel: [ 91.776000] ata2: soft resetting port
Mar 20 20:49:32 dell kernel: [ 92.088000] ata2: failed to recover some devices, retrying in 5 secs
Mar 20 20:49:37 dell kernel: [ 97.092000] ata2: soft resetting port
Mar 20 20:49:37 dell kernel: [ 97.404000] ata2.00: disabled
Mar 20 20:49:38 dell kernel: [ 97.908000] ata2: EH complete
Mar 20 20:49:38 dell kernel: [ 97.908000] VFS: busy inodes on changed media.
Mar 20 20:49:38 dell kernel: [ 97.912000] VFS: busy inodes on changed media.

But Feisty continues to run - without DVD-drive. It's even been nice enough to remove the icon from my desktop. Putting the drive back in, and nothing changes (nothing in the log files either).

Scenario 1 - Boot with DVD-drive out and battery pack in: when changing it, the drive is not recognized at all.

I post this as a support request as I'm unsure where to post a bug report. Anybody any ideas how to achieve my ultimate goal?