My DVD-RW drive has been working like a champ for the last 3 months. Today, I think it died.

Computer sees my DVD-RW Drive as:
GENERIC DVD RW 8XMax, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive

I've mounted and unmounted the drive with the terminal enough times with this computer to know what *should* work. This is what I get.

$ sudo mount /media/cdrecorder/
mount: No medium found

$ sudo mount /dev/hdd /mnt
mount: No medium found

If I'm not mistaken, that's the same message you get when you try to mount a CD drive when it doesn't have a disk in it.

This is what I get with /var/log/messages, and dmesg

$ sudo cat /var/log/messages | grep hdd
Mar 10 04:02:54 junk fstab-sync[4228]: added mount point /media/cdrecorder for /dev/hdd
Mar 10 13:49:02 junk kernel: ide1: BM-DMA at 0xffa8-0xffaf, BIOS settings: hdc:pio, hdd:DMA
Mar 10 13:49:03 junk kernel: hdd: GENERIC DVD RW 8XMax, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
Mar 10 13:49:03 junk kernel: hdd: ATAPI 40X DVD-ROM DVD-R CD-R/RW drive, 2048kB Cache, UDMA(33)
Mar 10 13:51:37 junk fstab-sync[4268]: added mount point /media/cdrecorder for /dev/hdd

$ dmesg | tail
Disabled Privacy Extensions on device c0360800(lo)
IPv6 over IPv4 tunneling driver
divert: not allocating divert_blk for non-ethernet device sit0
eth0: no IPv6 routers present
parport0: PC-style at 0x378 [PCSPP,TRISTATE,EPP]
lp0: using parport0 (polling).
lp0: console ready
application firefox-bin uses obsolete OSS audio interface
scsi: unknown opcode 0x01
scsi: unknown opcode 0x1e

I'm pretty sure that nothing there in dmesg deals with mounting the drive, because it doesn't change if I dmesg, try to mount, and do dmesg again.

So I'll run you through what's happened to my DVD drive from the last time I it worked to now.

I've been reminising with a little Diablo 2, and have been playing it with the latest version of Cedega. Tuesday, I was in a bit of a rush, and I needed to make a Data disk on the way out the door, so I right-clicked and ejected the D2 disk, and entered a blank one, which opens the Nautilis burn window. I dumped my files into the window, noticed that I had dumped 830 MB onto the disk, hit burn and it started, so I didn't think anything of it, and got ready to go. On the way out the door, I didn't have time to double check the disk, so I grabbed the cd from the ejected drive, and was out the door, the Screensaver was already up so I didn't see the error it gave me that I found when I got home. My little brother thought his version of k3b was out of date, so he tried using mine to make a music disk, but k3b was giving him an error about not accessing the disk. I thought that the error Nautilis gave me was about how much I tried to get onto the disk, so I closed it without worrying. I thought that k3b's error was because the drive was busy with nautilis, so I closed it with out worrying, put my D2 cd back in the drive to keep it from getting scratched, showed my brother how to update k3b, and came back to my computer, and found that I could not mount my cdrom drive anymore.

I've logged in as root, killed all the processes running that weren't being run by root, logged back in, and still nothing. I've rebooted, and got nothing. I've shut down, opened the case, checked the wireing, and still nothing.

Does anybody have anything else they can suggest? Or did it die?

Thanks for your help.

Fedora Core 3
2.6.10-1.741 Kernel
GENERIC DVD RW 8XMax, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive

*edit* Forgot to mention that I can't boot from a cd either. I've tried booting from a Knoppix and a Basilisk Live CD. Neither worked.

1. When you enter your bios setup, is the cdrom detected?
2. Does your bios list it during boot?
3. Do a "dmesg | less" after boot. Does Linux detect it?

This could be as simple as the drive data cable coming loose.

Yup
Yup
$ dmesg | grep hdd
ide1: BM-DMA at 0xffa8-0xffaf, BIOS settings: hdcio, hddMA
hdd: GENERIC DVD RW 8XMax, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
hdd: ATAPI 40X DVD-ROM DVD-R CD-R/RW drive, 2048kB Cache, UDMA(33)
SELinux: initialized (dev hdd, type iso9660), uses genfs_contexts
That's another yup
DARN FRACK 'EM SMACK 'EM!!!!

Powered off, played with the cables, but didn't feel anything move, but when I powered back on, it works like a champ....

I talked to a buddy of mine who's been a Unix Admin for a while, and he blames the Windows App. Says that running Diablo 2 with Cedega may have mucked up the drive requireing a shut down, rather than just a reboot (which is what I had done previously.) I havn't powered off this guy for atleast a month.

Moral of the story: Sometimes all you need to do is "stirr some dust."

Thanks!