HP ML350 & HP External USB DVD drive no workie

[PaulD1962]

This should be extremely trivial. We resell a lot of HP servers. One customer has some ML350-G5 servers.  It is running Windows Server 2003 R2 SP2 32-bit.  They need DVD-RAM capability.  The built-in LightScribe drive quickspecs didn't list DVD-RAM, and, it didn't seem to work when I put one in.  (I was on-site at this customer a couple of weeks ago, but I'm now at my office, customer is out of state from me).  So, since the internal drive didn't seem to support DVD-RAM, I recommended the HP part: VV827AA#ABB external USB DVD drive.  Customer says they hook up the drive to the machine, and it doesn't seem to work, the drive F: keeps appearing/disappearing from Windows Explorer.  They say the plugged the drive into an XP machine and it works, but they want it to be on the 2003 Server machine.

So, we opened up an HP support case, #4633621508.  The response I got was that drive isn't supported for the ML350!  What???  Its just an external USB DVD drive.  What difference does it make what server I'm hooking it up to???  In the response from HP, they listed several drives as being supported on the ML-350, but that none of them list DVD-RAM!!!

Isn't there just a simple driver or something to get the HP part: VV827AA#ABB to work on the HP server???

Thanks for any help!!!