Why did my disc drives power down?

[gillbo_kenny]

I am brand new to Linux and I have a multitude of questions. But for now I'll stick to just one - Does anyone know why my disc drives (cdrom and dvdrw) just randomly stop working?

They are working one second and then the next, nothing, not even power. It's happened multiple times to both drives but not necesarily at the same time. I can't seem to find any sort of pattern to when they shut down.

Just installed SuSE 10.0 (x86.64) on my system. Specs are as follows -

AMD Athalon 64 3500+
MSI K8N Neo4-F (nForce4)
1GB DDR-4 Corsair XMS memory
Nvidia Geforce 6600GT (pci express)

[antebeotic]

I experienced the same problem. It won't eject, unless I do it from software and it won't answer to anything (I'm using a TEAC dvd/rw).
I'm writing this from Windoze (i'm at the office) and I can't quite remember where exactly it was, but look for a MEDIA directory, somewhere in the main folder. Inside you will find your CD/DVD and you can access it. It works from me every time.
Let me know if this helps you. If you can't find MEDIA, i'll look again when I get home

[AlexK]

when you say the drives shutdown or stop working, you mean that you can't eject them or read them using konqueror or whatever file manager you are using?

[gillbo_kenny]

when you say the drives shutdown or stop working, you mean that you can't eject them or read them using konqueror or whatever file manager you are using?

I'm using the GNOME desktop. When the drives stop working it is as if someone cut the power to them. They will not eject and the disk images disappear from the desktop. Going into the file browser won't open them either though I haven't tried going through the /media path (next time it occurs I'll try that). I've never experienced something like this before. I didn't even know that it was possible for disc drives to power down or ignore their external eject buttons.

[AlexK]

When this happens again, take a look at the output from the command dmesg to see if anything is amiss.

Also, if you want the drive to eject, try either one of these commands as root:

eject /media/dvdrecorder  <---- replace /media/dvdrecorder with the name of drive

or

umount -f /dev/hdc  <--- replace with correct device name

the -f in umount command means force.

[catskinner]

Try Ctrl/Alt+F10. If you see a whole bunch of "lost Interrupt" messages then you have a world of problems that I havn't been able to dig out from.I think it may be caused by the second kernel upgrade I installed with YAST, but am not sure yet. As a relative newbie and trying to use an older machine with a cranky personality all its own, my troubles may also be hardware related.

[jyoungxxxx]

This usually means that you have a console window open and you have a current path of the same directory you mounted your cdroms to and this won't let you eject when you are in the directory.