CD-RW comes and goes: problem with devfs?

[sheepdog]

After booting Gentoo sometimes my Sony CD-RW shows up and sometimes it doesn't. When it doesn't I reboot or sometimes the machine has to be turned off completely and turned back on before the kernel sees it. It always shows up normally on post and there has never been any problem using it to boot with or to read/write CDs once the kernel identifies it. I think it is a problem with devfs. Anybody with any suggestions?