Bizarre CD-Rom trouble

[pardsbane at offthehill.org (Josh Pollak)]

On Nov 23, 2004, at 1:48 PM, dsr at tao.merseine.nu wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 23, 2004 at 01:44:22PM -0500, Josh Pollak wrote:
>> I've swapped drives repeatedly, and each time with the same result, it
>> will eject and work fine once or twice, and then it starts freaking
>> out. What could be causing this? I thought maybe the secondary IDE
>> controller was screwed up, but it recognizes and reads from the drives
>> just fine, so I'm really puzzled.
>
> Check for weird BIOS settings. For example, does this
> motherboard offer a "no-boot CD player" option?

No, it doesn't. I'll pour over the BIOS settings again though.

I should add that I've reset the BIOS to 'optimized default' (maybe I 
should try 'safe defaults'), that I've upgraded the bios, and the drive 
doesn't eject even during bootup, which is something I've generally 
seen drives do.

I've heard that using screws that are too long inside a cd drive can 
mess them up. Can then permanently mess them up, or just temporarily? I 
don't think the screws are very long, only 2 mm or so, but maybe thats 
enough. I could imagine binding the tray closed with the screws and the 
eject mechanism breaking, but I can't imagine that happening repeatedly 
on different brand drives.

-Josh