Bizarre CD-Rom trouble

[Jeff Kinz]

On Tue, Nov 23, 2004 at 09:39:22PM -0500, Mark J. Dulcey wrote:
> Josh Pollak wrote:
> 
> > Ok, this is really puzzling me, and I'm wondering if anyone else has 
> > seen this. It happens on both Linux and Windows, so its probably a 
> > hardware issue, but I'm hoping someone can give me some tips anyway.
> > 
> > I've got a Shuttle K41G XPC, one of those small 8x8 cube PC's. The 
> > screwy thing is, no matter what CD rom drive I put in there, it refuses 
> > to eject. Generally, it will eject the first time I put the drive in the 
> > PC, but then it stops working. They will still read the CD's that are in 
> > the drives, but I can't swap them. When I use eject -t (or right click 
> > on the drive and select eject on windows), or if I just hit the eject 
> > button I get the same result:
> > 
> > The tray motor stutters a bit, the access light flashes for a minute, 
> > and then 'autoplay' re-engages, as if the drive thinks it just loaded a 
> > new CD, when in reality it just re-accessed the old one. Adding to the 
> > oddity, whenever the drive does this access dance, my UPS beeps like its 
> > being drained of power, or as if it has been disconnected from the wall 
> > (which it hasn't).
> > 
> > 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.
> 
> One possibility is that the power supply in the box is marginal, and 
> can't supply enough extra juice to operate the drive tray. 
> Unfortunately, it's probably some sort of silly non-standard thing, so 
> you can't just go over to MicroCenter and get a bigger one.

One other possibility (On Linux) is that some process has opened a file on
the CD resulting in all your eject commands being ignored until that
file is closed.

For example, if Nautilus or some other file explorer auto-magically
opens when you insert a CD-ROM, you sometimes can't eject till you close 
that window.

Idealism:  "Realism applied over a longer time period"
http://www.scaled.com/projects/tierone/
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Jeff Kinz, Emergent Research, Hudson, MA.
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