CD-Rom keeps opening automatically

[caimoss]

Just installed SuSE 9.1 personal on a system which had been previously running Win98 (how about that for my trusting and non-technical sister in law taking the Linux leap!?). Anyway, CDROM used to work fine in Win98.

I'm still a linux newbie, only have done an installation of SuSE 9.0 professional on one of my own PCs. Have done very little with hardware configuration/setup so far in my learning, and not having run into any problems on that system so far.

Now, after having done the 9.1 Personal installation successfully (fully repartioning the drive along the way), the CDROM continues to open up within seconds of closing it. Happens whether or not there is a CD in it.

So far I've tried:

1.

eject -a off

which does not stop it from happening.

2. Unplugging the data cable while the system is off, then booting up and seeing if it behaves normally with the eject button. When the data cable is unplugged, it opens and closes only when I hit the button. Based on some other google searching this tells me it might not be a bad drive. I had read that if the laser is bad on some drives, they will open automatically as a safety measure since the laser won't operate when the drive is open. Since it behaves when the IDE cable is not connected, I am inclined to think something is sending it a command.

I've double-checked that the jumpers on the CDROM are set correctly and it's on the right connector on the cable (Master, only device connected on IDE channel 2).

Any ideas I can look at? Perhaps something in KDE's apps I could look at, or anything in fstab? I'm looking into those now, but I'm kinda lost with them.

TIA!

 

[caimoss]

Just an update. When I change to runlevel 3, the cd works fine. I can mount it, read data from CDs, and open and close the tray via the command line. When I switch back to runlevel 5 and KDE is up and running, it starts with the phantom opening and closing again. This leads me to believe there is some process in KDE that is sending the open/close signals to the cdrom, but I haven't figured out which one might be doing it yet.

 

[chris13]

Is there a cd-player loaded in the tray?
What happens if you mount/unmount cdrom in KDE?
curious...

 

[caimoss]

Not sure what you mean by a cd-player loaded in the tray.

Did some more troubleshooting through KDE, but though I killed every process that appeared to be utilizing the CDRom in some way, it still happened.

As it turns out, while looking for a new IDE cable in case of it being a hardware problem, I found I had a spare CDRom. Replaced the existing one with this other one (both were 24X, roughly the same age), and things are perfectly fine now.

The old CDRom still works in other computers, so I think it might just be something with that particular model combined with KDE.

 

[xigarete]

I have what appears to be the exact same problem with SuSE 9.1 and a Mitsumi 4804 CD-RW. Very annoying.

Based on someone else's CD question, I opened KsCD - while it's open (including minimized) the CDRW isn't opening. So that's something.

arete

 

[xigarete]

Ok, so I was wrong. It stayed closed for a while... then it started opening again.

Tried leaving a CD in, that didn't work. Maybe I'll try making it think it's playing music, possibly that'll help.

arete

 

[thedaver]

Are you running automount?

http://www.surfinbox.com/hosting/