Replacing bad CDRom drive

[Jon Moss]

After spending the entire weekend attempting to install three (3) different versions of Redhat, I 
finally determined (I know, I'm a little slow when it comes to hardware) that my CD-ROM drive is 
dying.  

I have a new 52x CD-ROM I would like to install in it's place.  I've done this many, many times on 
WinDoze computers, but never on a Linux workstation.  

Is Linux (Redhat 7.3 currently installed) Plug-N-Play?  I've reviewed the HowTos at the Linux 
Documentation Project (the CDROM one is nearly two years old) and it seems to indicate that I will 
have to re-install or re-compile the kernel.  Is this true?  

My intention is to get the CD ROM working so I can upgrade to RedHat 9 (which is what I started 
doing last Friday evening with no luck; I was at RedHat 8 when I started). 

Any suggestions or pointers would be greatly appreciated!

Jon Moss 
jon.moss at cnonline.net