strange NEC CD-RW drive problem

I've started having a problem with my NEC NR-7700A CD-RW drive
on my 2+ year old Gateway machine. If I do a power up (cold
reboot), the activity LED on the drive blinks constantly, the BIOS
(American Megatrends) doesn't recognize the drive properly,
and consequently, Windows XP (or Linux) won't recognize the
drive exists. If I do a restart (warm boot), the BIOS recognizes
the CD-RW drive properly and consequently the drive can be used
from WinXP (or Linux).

I fiddled with the BIOS setup so it displays info on the various
IDE devices (including 2 hard drives). When the failure occurs
(cold reboot), the drive is identified as "2.0 NEC CDROM
DRIVE: IDE". When it works (warm reboot), the drive is identified
as "1.23 _NEC NR-7700A", which apparently makes WinXP (and Linux)
happy. (The 1.23 seems to correspond to the firmware verion on
the drive.)

Anybody seen anything like this before? This appears to be to
be a problem with the CD-RW drive, but could conceivably be something
with the motherboard (or even the IDE cable, I suppose). This
machine is still under warranty, but in talking to the Gateway
tech support folks, they aren't sure whether it's the drive or the
motherboard, so they want me to ship the tower to their service
center in Texas to be diagnosed (and presumably fixed). However,
it'll cost $50+ to ship it and I'll be missing my computer for
3-4 weeks, so I'd rather not do that unless I have to.

Thanks in advance.

Mike Holder