Sorry--I forgot to ever repost my solution. It was the flex cable for me (and probably just about everyone in this thread). Apparently they're pretty fucxing delicate. (this one for my model: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Apple-922-9060-13-MacBook-Pro-Unibody-Optical-Drive-Flex-Cable-821-0889-A-/280890775297?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash...) I went ahead and took my computer to the apple store. I was sure they weren't going to fix it, though I was hoping they might have a spare cable they could test to rule out LB failure (again). I put the original optical drive back in (unrecognized in sys profiler) and told the techs I had tested the drive in another computer and that I thought I might have a malfunctioning SATA port. They looked at me sideways and told me my warranty was suposed to be void if I'd cracked the shell, but took the computer anyway. They gave me/the machine the standard rundown of patronizing tests, but when it all showed up like I'd said, they just shipped it off and fixed it for free (awesome and...

I'm having nearly the exact same issue. My logic board suffered some unfortunate liquid damage earlier this year (MBP wouldn't even boot). I found a guy on ebay who does logicboard repairs rather than replacements (saved me hundreds) and my computer worked fine for a couple months. I recently replaced the SuperDrive with a Kingston SSD and everything was working fine for a few weeks. One day when I got home from work I got a kernel panic and my computer refused to boot. I reinstalled SL onto the 320GB HDD that came with the computer via firewire and Target Disk mode (I had converted it to a storage drive) but was unable to write to the SSD. I was able to recover data from the drive using DiskWarrior, but I could not write, erase or repartition the SSD. I tried to repair the SSD using Disk Utility several times, each time with "success" but I could not use the drive. After a day or two, the SSD stopped being recognized by the computer (not showing up in Disk Utility or System Profiler). I removed the SSD...