Cd-rw tray won't open
 

My generic cdrw has had this problem where the tray was very difficult to open- you had to press the button many times until it would finally open. Now it doesn't open at all. The 'busy' light is on and it's making some noise. When I was using windows, it seemed to open easier when I did 'eject' via software (i.e. Nero).

Before I had this burner, I had a sony that worked great for a year then developed this same problem.

Anyone know what this is? Is it just worn out?

Thanks

Hi ren,

If you are on Linux, there should be a command "eject" :!:
If not, try: umount /cdrom or umount/dev/your_cd_rom_mount_point_goes_here

If you don't know you CD mount point, type: dmesg | grep CD and look at the messages to find out the mount point for your CD Rom.
After you eject and remove the CD-R in the drive (if that's the case), use a sledge hammer and strike the crap out of that drive, to release your preasure, and then buy a new one :mrgreen:

-kwag

Can you tell the specs of the computer because I once had a problem and it fulted in the drives for the chipset for the m/b. Also try finding firmware for it and reboot the computer off of a boot disk and flash the cd drive.

Yeah I tried eject /dev/cdrom1 but the tray still wouldn't open. Before I take the sledge hammer to it I might try removing the drive mechanism and installing a knob onto it so I can open and close the tray manually :lol:


That might be it!! It seems too much of a coincidence that two drives would fail like this! The BTC cdrw drive is mounted on the secondary IDE channel on the Asus P4B motherboard as the "master" (dvd-rom is slave).

Happen to know of any sites that can teach me how to flash the cdrw drive? I tried to do this with the bios one time but I chickened out :D

I once updated my rebaged lite-on, back to lite-on. It was pathetic that all the did is stick a sticker on top of the original stick and change to there version of firmware. So I went to this site one of these sites (it was about a year and half ago so bare with me), http://club.cdfreaks.com/ or http://www.cdrinfo.com/forum/. Look there and see what you can do also if its generic its probably most likely rebaged, so also try finding out what it is. But before you flash check the drive and see the jumpers are right and try a different cable if they are, it might solve your problem.
Flashing can lead to an unusable drive so be careful.

Edit: what it truly sounds like is an upside down cable, but I thought that only exist on floppy drives (it gives it a constant light telling you, you placed it wrong).
P.S. it could be firmware, but check every option first, and it hard to corrupt the firmware unless you accidentally flash the firmware, somehow.

Usually with IDE devices, an upside down cable will just keep the drive from doing anything. At the worst, your computer will refuse to boot (at least in my experience I've never seen an upside down IDE cable wreck a system, and I've hooked a lot of them up wrong :-) ).

But like ak47 said, try everything before flashing the drive (or the sledgehammer method). Check the settings in your BIOS, maybe it doesn't like what's there now (although I'd expect it to work in Linux if that were the case, since Linux usually ignores the BIOS).

I truly don't think that it is in the bios, cause I never heard of an option that you can really change anything for the cd drive except boot order and see if it works in the ide channel, but it could be something corrupted in the cmos, so you can reset that and see if the light goes away. Now when I think of it, it could be a burned wire in the ide cable or a bad connector, some cables are really cheap and overtime just overheat too much and melts.

Some (most?) bioses still let you change the type of IDE drive. I suppose a CD drive could get confused if the bios tells it that it's a hard drive. I doubt it's the case too, but I'm going through every possibility in my head...

A friend of mine fixed a bad hard drive when he swapped out a bad IDE cable. It was clearly broken when you looked at it (one connector was coming loose), but obviously any number of bad wires would cause problems too.

I finally got the tray opened by prying it open with two screwdrivers :!: :D Now the tray will open and close only if there is a cd in the tray :?:

Use the force Luke :rotf:

-kwag