Can't eject CD/DVD after warm reboot?

Dan Jenkins dan at rastech.com
Thu Aug 27 12:53:27 EDT 2009


Michael ODonnell wrote:
>  Most of our HP systems (all recent models like xw8600 and z800)
>  refuse to eject their optical media when the drive button is pushed
>  after a warm reboot following a rescue/install session booted from
>  that drive. Other systems (eg.  Dells) behave as we'd like when
>  booted from those same discs so this seems clearly to be something
>  related to HP hardware design or BIOS code.  This behavior is seen
>  after using DVDs created using the old "Timo's Rescue CD"
>  (Debian-based w/2.4 kernel) as well as a fairly current SysRescueCD
>  (Gentoo-based w/2.6 kernel) configs.
>
>  Is there some trick (maybe some kernel commandline option or some
>  program executed during shutdown) that will leave the drive willing
>  to eject the media ("unlock" it?)  without us having to power-cycle
>  these machines?
>
>  The Dell drives are IDE and the HPs are SATA - might that be
>  relevant?
>
>  Is it the case that the HPs are working "correctly" according to some
>  spec and that the other systems that allow it are in fact the ones
>  whose behavior is b0rken?

With SysRescueCD you can specify a parameter (docache) at boot to load 
the CD into a RAM drive, so that the CD can be ejected. Elsewise, the 
drive is locked while it is operating. It does unlock when we reboot on 
most systems, but we have found a few that actually require a power 
cycle to unlock the drive. That would be broken behavior.



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