DVD drive lights every second
 

I'm running SUSE 9.3 on a Mitac 8355 clone. One thing I just noticed is that the DVD drive status light for the DVD on top of the keyboard 'blips' every second. The DVD drive is a
hdc: MATSHITADVD-RAM UJ-811, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
Yeah, it sucks.

Things I checked or looked at:
* it blips every second whether the drive is open or closed
* the drive light on the DVD itself is not lighting
* There are no errors being reported in dmesg or /var/log/* that match this frequency
* hdparm -C /dev/hdc reports the drive state is "standby"
* I tried killing SuSEPlugger thinking that may have been 'monitoring' things, but that made no difference - still a blip.
* changing to runlevel 3 still left me with the blip each second
* couldn't really tell where it kicked in on a reboot - things were flashing by too quickly :-(

Is this something to worry about? Am I going crazy?? What else can I check?

Thanks in advance
ws

Hey,

I think it is a keyboard configuration error.... To be sure, remove the power cable from the dvd-drive (turn your computer off first ;) ) - then see if it is still happening...



Cheers,
Andrew

Read through /var/log/messages. Also if you have xev, note the keymap to include it in the keymap file. Use xset to turn the LED light off.

I have never seen a keyboard that gives you status of drives. If nothing works, get another keyboard that is basic.

I may not have explained that properly??

It's not the keyboard, it's the drive status blinkenlighten that are located above the keyboard on my laptop.

Ahhh,

We thought you had a desktop.


Even so, it may be special feature in your laptop keyboard... if you can't see any error messages in your system logs, and the drive works fine, perhaps try re-configuring your keyboard settings ? :(


A.

Is there a seperate led for the hardrive?
If not are you sure it is for the dvd?
More than likely it is activite on the ide interface which includes all ide devices.

Just a thought
Brian1

Yes, there's a separate led for H/D and DVD.
Mmmm. Could be, but I can't quite work out what would be 'pinging' it every second....


There's no errors in any system logs, but I'll give that a go. I do have a pretty funky keyboard and end up doing an xmodmap.

ws

Gotcha!
 

OK, I finally worked out what it was. It's the HAL daemon (hald).
I think suseplugger relies on it, but killed suseplugger and then
/etc/init.d/hal stop
and there was no more blinking!

That will have me lose hotplug :(

Anyways, now I'm off to see what I might be able to do about HAL CD/DVD polling.


Thx for those that replied.
ws

Well, got that worked out pretty quickly. Amazing once you know what you are looking for :D

I created a file
/usr/share/hal/fdi/95userpolicy/custom.fdi with contents:
No more polling of the CD/DVD and hotplug still works!!!

Glad you have it fixed. That some good reading.

Brian1

hello,
i was googling same problem i'm having since install of mandriva 2006. i was doing an interactive startup and noticed that the flickering activity light on my dvd drive on my laptop starts when the hal daemon starts. I was trying to find info on hal daemon to see if it is needed when i came across you're post. Could you please advise me what are consequences of hal being stopped and will that modified file be of any use to a mandriva user. i'm a relative linux newbie so this all kinda new...

thanx,
alan