I'm running Ubuntu 8.04 on a Dell Inspiron 1300 laptop. The laptop dual-boots Windows 2000.

When running Linux, the DVD drive spins constantly whenever any disk is in there (blank disk, music CD, Video DVD - anything). It *never* spins down in Linux. This doesn't happen in Windows, so I know it's not a hardware problem. The DVD drive spins down just fine in Windows.

The ONLY way I can get the drive to spin down in Linux is to open the tray. Unmounting doesn't work, in fact the drive spins constantly even before being mounted. It starts as soon as the tray is closed.

DVD Drive Model: DVD+-RW GSA-T11N Rev: A103

I have no idea where to look to try to solve this. If anyone has any ideas I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks.

you could issue a standby command to the drive.
"hdparm -y /dev/dvd"

I'll give that a shot and let you know.

If it works, I could use it as a workaround, but I would still like to know what is causing it so that I can stop it from happening in the first place.

thanks

if it works, you could set up a cron command to issue that command to the drive however often you like.

Ok, so that makes it stop spinning, so at least I can use that as a workaround.

As for what is causing the problem, I just noticed something. It doesn't start spinning until KDE loads.

So if I insert the disk at the KDM prompt, it sits idle, but then when I login, the disk starts spinning at some point during the KDE loading process, which would seem to indicate it is a KDE process that is causing this.

Does anyone know anything about the KDE loading process and where I might look?

Thanks again!

that would be either the KDE media manager or the Media Notifier Daemon. Check in the KDE control panel under KDE components/Service Manager to enable/disable these things.

Usually, if the drive keeps spinning, this means that the system is trying to read the disk information and failing, so it keeps retrying. I am sure this can be configured someplace but I don't know where.