CD drive locked, not recognized in full Lucid install

[tayloratosu]

My daughter has an old, slow laptop with only 128M of RAM. For a while she was running Lucid from a live CD. After I decided this was the way to go, I formatted her hard drive and installed Lucid, using the full install. Works great.

The problem? I can't get the live CD out of the cd drive! If I boot up using the live CD, the CD icon shows up on the drive mounter thingie, but it's locked (obviously, because she's got only 128M of RAM). This is the case even if I use pfix=nox,ram.

If I boot up from the hard drive, Puppy doesn't even see the CD drive at all! Running dmesg shows that it finds the drive, and 'cdrecord -scanbus' identifies it as a SCSI device, but I can't mount it, I can't umount it (because it's not mounted) and I can't eject it, and the automount applet thingie doesn't seem to think I even have a CD drive.

If I press on the drive's eject button, it goes click-click, but nothing else happens. I think that means that the drive is locked, but darned if I can find a command to unlock it. Unfortunately, the only two ways to boot this laptop are from the hard drive and the CD, so I can't easily boot up with a different OS.

Help!

[Karl Godt]

First make sure '/dev/sr0' is there :

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ls -ls /dev/sr0

0 brw-rw---- 1 root cdrom 11, 0 2001-02-14 14:57 /dev/sr0

and '/dev/cdrom

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ls -ls /dev/cd*

0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 8 2011-09-20 21:04 /dev/cdrom -> /dev/sr0

Than check for sr0 in the sysfs system in the '/sys/block' and '/sys/class/block'

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 find /sys -maxdepth 4 -iname "sr0" -exec ls -ls {} \;

I have detached my cdrom atm so can not give any example output ; the command would show sr0 as the windows driver and USERinterface chip of ~80 MB of my USB modem :

0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 2011-09-21 23:24 /sys/class/block/sr0 -> ../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1f.2/usb1/1-1/1-1.4/1-1.4:1.3/host6/target6:0:0/6:0:0:0/block/sr0
0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 2011-09-21 23:24 /sys/block/sr0 -> ../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1f.2/usb1/1-1/1-1.4/1-1.4:1.3/host6/target6:0:0/6:0:0:0/block/sr0

If you are having such a modem-pendrive attached , sr1 might be the right device name for the cd-drive . Replace sr0 with sr1 in the shell console commands above .


The other thing is : are you booting by grub from the mbr of the HD , or by booting the CD ?

[tayloratosu]

Thanks for the suggestions, Karl. The drive does appear to be sr0, and the computer is indeed booting from the hard drive.

I have discovered that if I'm quick, I can see the CD drive for a brief time in the disk mounter thingie after I have booted from the hard drive, but it quickly disappears. If I'm *really* quick, I can try to mount it, but it gives me an error. (I would think that this indicates a hardware problem, except that I can boot from the CD with no problem.)

I managed to get Tiny Core Linux installed and booting on the hard drive; it recognizes the CD drive, but whenever I try to read from it or eject it, I get "Input/Output error".