Problem with CD drive (or so it seems)

[theYinYeti]

I regularly have a kind-of-freeze problem with the laptop I use at work. The laptop is not freezed actually, but its CPU goes so high that almost nothing can be done… (up to one minute per keystroke).

 

Some time ago, I discovered that such a freeze would always eventually happen if a CD had at least been inserted into the CD drive. It can happen if the CD drive hasn't been used, but it always happens eventually if the CD drive has been used.

 

When the freeze occurs, I get these three messages repeated every 5 seconds either on the console, or in the logs:

hdc: status timeout: status=0xd0 { Busy }
ide: failed opcode was: unknown
hdc: drive not ready for command

 

Yesterday, I managed to see the output of `top` while the freeze occured. hald-addon-stor was running like mad, ranging from 50% to 190% (dual-core), depending on the activity of other processes. I once saw syslog at 100%!

So I killed the hald-addon-stor(age?) process, and looked at the syslog file, and… the end of the file was repeatedly filled with the above three lines.

 

What can I do to stop the problem? It is a laptop from work and I have absolutely no possibility to change it, or even a single part of it.

 

Yves.

[theYinYeti]

Wow! This is exactly my problem:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=428756

 

And comparing my lshal output with his, it seems we have exactly the same drive! 'TSSTcorpCD/DVDW TS-L632D'

 

What would be the consequences of black-listing the drive in HAL, as the bug report suggests?

 

Yves.

 

[edit:] Now this looks like a fix. I'll see that. [/edit]

Edited May 29, 2008 by theYinYeti

[scarecrow]

No problems here with a very similar drive (TS-L632H)

Which firmware revision AND laptop manufacturer? I'm asking bevause the firmware provided by Samsung will NOT flash on OEM drives used by Dell, Toshiba etc.

[theYinYeti]

No problems here with a very similar drive (TS-L632H)

Which firmware revision AND laptop manufacturer?

Samsung laptop. I went from SC02 to SC04 yesterday.

No problem so far, but it's too soon to say.

I'm asking bevause the firmware provided by Samsung will NOT flash on OEM drives used by Dell, Toshiba etc.

In command line you can. Follow the links :)

 

Yves.