StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Self explanatory. I open the drive to take a game out, and the thing closes before I can make a grab for it- or worse, closes in the middle as I'm taking it out, taking the disc with it and jamming it.

This has been driving me up the fucking wall since last night.

What brand and model is it? Perhaps this could be a known problem.

My bet;this is one of those funky drives which tries to be "helpful" by auto-closing the drive if something tries to access it.

my drive runs into this problem occasionaly. Doesn't happen very often, but I have a workaround for it nonetheless.

Try tapping the open button, then pressing and holding it. It *should* override the auto-close and keep the drive open as long as you keep your finger on the button.

This isn't much help, but that happened to me, with the second CD in the Fedora Core 3 install set, which I was trying to dual boot with Windows. Of course, even to install a basic, GUIless OS, you need at least the first two disks, and of course, this occured *after* the Windows bootloader had been trashed, leaving me OS-less.

Which was entertaining

Mange the Swede wrote:What brand and model is it? Perhaps this could be a known problem.

It's a Samsung SD-616E - I ran a google search on the general issue and more people seem to have a problem with involuntary opening rather than closing *shrug*

The mechanism behind the button could be jammed, so that the draw doesn't lock open. Does it stop, or does it smoothly go out then straight back in?

I had this problem too with a CD drive. I suspected that the button itself was somehow jammed a bit.

Stark wrote:The mechanism behind the button could be jammed, so that the draw doesn't lock open. Does it stop, or does it smoothly go out then straight back in?

Sometimes it's smooth, sometimes it stops.

If you're comfortable taking the front panel off your drive, you can unclip it and check the button and the 'emergency open' device that's behind the little pinhole. I'd say unscrew the drive, take the front panel off, then turn your puter on and watch it as it works. It sounds like a purely mechanical problem, but you've got to work out which button is busted or sticking or which pushrod or cog isn't stopping.

Sometimes losing a tooth off the end of a cog can make the door not lock open.

And double-check to be sure something isn't shorting the switch.

You also might want to scan your machine. I've seen some "prank" programs running on machines that do funky things like that. The chance is REMOTE that you might have something like that, but it is possible.