Mandrake's errata page shows that installing Mandrake 9.2 has rendered some LG drives useless. The drives are completely toast. I had downloaded Mandrake the other day to try it out; perhaps I will pass. Note that at this time it appears to affect only certain firmware revisions. According to Mandrake, LG says they do not test any of their drives with linux. The problem is something to do with the FLUSH_COMMAND screwing up the firmware. LG has fixed the problem with new firmware revisions.
There is more on this in Slashdot thread. I may look into this further, I would not have purchased an LG product if I had known that they did not test anything with linux. My fault as a consumer - I should have investigated a bit deeper. Lesson learned.
On the plus side, in researhcing this, I found that no one really like the new Mandrake anyways. Apparently it is a mess.