[Tfug] CDs: no medium found, DVDs work (sometimes)

[Jeremy D Rogers]

Well, I finally got a chance to reboot one of the machines and try
booting from the cd. I figured it would be 'proof' that Zack was wrong
if the thing boots from cd, but doesn't read the cd once booted from
the drive. Much to my chagrin, it looks like Zack (and others) was
right. The hardware looks like its dead.

Very strange though since the DVD part still works 'sometimes'. I
tried pulling the drive and putting in another machine and that also
failed to read the disk. Then after put it back in the workstation,
the CD worked 2-3 times just fine and then started failing again. Now
it's at about 30% of the time. DVDs are more like 70% but also fails
frequently. Any the same across 3 different machines. I guess sometime
the odds are just that bad.

Thanks to all for suggestions.
JDR



On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 10:51 AM, John Kiniston <john at meatkite.com> wrote:
> You shouldnt ever use canned air to clean a CD/DVD Drive, any dust inside
> will get blown about and possibly damage the optics.
> You can try something
> like http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2361964 if
> you think the drive is dirty tho I doubt the 'Cleans and demagnetizes with
> its Thunderon Brush System for improved results' line as the disks are not
> magnetic.
>
> On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 8:19 AM, <earljviolet at deserthowler.com> wrote:
>>
>> It does sound strange them all going at the same time.
>> You didn't say if this happens with different brands of media or not.
>> Some of the old readers I've come across seem to have that problem, but
>> that's mostly been with DVDs and rarely with CDs.  Cheap generic seem to
>> be more cross hardware.
>> I've also found canned air to be a healing touch on some DVCDs.
>>
>> Earl
>>
>> On Mon, June 28, 2010 2:40 pm, JD Rogers wrote:
>> > Hi All,
>> >
>> > I think I may have even posted on this before, but I got inspired
>> > today to try to fix this issue, and I'm stuck. I don't use cds that
>> > much which is both good and bad, since I think this problem first
>> > showed up sometime around 1 year ago with ubuntu 9.4 or maybe 9.10.
>> >
>> > I have three workstations: 2 with identical hardware, 1 with a
>> > different MB/CPU, but with the same cdrom drive.
>> >
>> > I can rule out hardware for 2 reasons: all three systems consistently
>> > fail to read CDs. DVD's seem to mount ok 'sometimes' - maybe 1/2-2/3
>> > of the time.
>> >
>> > Symptoms:
>> > insert disk, disk spins, drive light blinks, eventually nothing. No
>> > messages in dmesg. If I use "lshw -c disk", I see 'status=busy' for a
>> > while and then eventually 'status=nodisc'.
>> >
>> > When the data DVD fails to mount, the symptoms are the same, but it
>> > clearly works sometimes, so the cables are fine, the disks I'm testing
>> > with are all fine (checked in other computers).
>> >
>> > If I try to "cat /dev/sr0" with the disk in, it says "cat: /dev/sr0:
>> > No medium found"
>> >
>> > ANY ideas on how to further debug this would be great.
>> > Thanks,
>> > JDR
>> >
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>>
>> --
>> If you play a Windows install CD backwards it has satanic verses.
>>
>>
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