CD/DVD lockup

[Will Honea]

I got involved with a project that requires frequent changes of the CD in my
machines. The CD's are all audio and the issue crops up in both machines.
They use different brands of DVD-RW drives but the issue is common to both.

The scenario that seems to be problematic is that after several quick
changes of the cdrom I will eventually hit the tray and it will close
empty. Most of the time I can hit the button on the front and it re-opens
but with annoying regularity there is nothing I can do short of a reboot to
get that blasted drive open - it just sits there with no sign of activity.
I have yet to see this with a disc in the drive. It also has not yet
happened if I programatically eject the disc, only when I manually open the
tray (I know - if it hurts DON'T DO THAT!). After a reboot all is well
until I close on an empty tray again. Both machine do this. Both run
11.1. One is an AMD-64x2 running the 64-bit kernel, the other is an old
dog running the 32-bit default uni kernel.

One clue: I noted that if I opened a VirtualBox session while it was hung
up, VB complained that the reset line was unavailable. If I power the
drive down (pull the power) VB gets over its' problem but the drive is
still not available to OS.

Is there any way to do a forced reset of the io system such that the drive
is released? Any other workaround for this issue?

--
Will Honea

[Sagemta]

I make no guarantees but this might help:
1.If in KDE4 go to the Desktop Folder, For KDE 3.5 or Gnome Right any where on the Desktop click select New Link To Application
2.In the window that opens, name the link Tray,
3.then click the Application tab, and in the Command box type eject -T.
4.Back on the General tab, click the icon button and choose an appropriate icon from the Devices group, then click OK.
Once this is on your desktop just click on it to open or close your CD/DVD drive.
I put this on mine & now it's the only way I open & close the thing.

[Will Honea]

Sagemta wrote:

>
> I make no guarantees but this might help:
> 1.If in KDE4 go to the Desktop Folder, For KDE 3.5 or Gnome Right any
> where on the Desktop click select New Link To Application
> 2.In the window that opens, name the link Tray,
> 3.then click the Application tab, and in the Command box type eject -T.
> 4.Back on the General tab, click the icon button and choose an
> appropriate icon from the Devices group, then click OK.
> Once this is on your desktop just click on it to open or close your
> CD/DVD drive.
> I put this on mine & now it's the only way I open & close the thing.

Just watch - it will take a week for the darned thing to hang up now and
I'll forget all this. Looks promising as it will let me issue the eject
directly to the /dev/sr0 to bypass any filtering via the media: or cdrom
path. Works like a champ - but then so does everything else just now.

Thanks.

--
Will Honea

[Will Honea]

Will Honea wrote:

>
> Just watch - it will take a week for the darned thing to hang up now and
> I'll forget all this.  Looks promising as it will let me issue the eject
> directly to the /dev/sr0 to bypass any filtering via the media: or cdrom

OK, looks like the problem is impatience - mine and the drivers. On a
hunch, I tried some "now why did you do that" stuff and it pretty well
boils down to this: if you either open OR close the DVD/CD tray and don't
wait until all the activity dies down on the drive before you reverse your
action you will likely get the hang. If you wait a while after
opening/closing the tray before trying to reverse it appears to keep right
on trucking. I was going through so many discs that I would get in a hurry
to load the next one and it's pretty easy to get ahead of the
detect/load/unload process. That shouldn't be an issue but it appears to
be the case. I'll file a bug report if this observation holds up. I notice
Grip has a setting that addresses a CD eject problem workaround (doesn't
help here) so this may be something that's been around for a while. Hard
as heck to debug when it's that erratic.

--
Will Honea