G'day all,

The subject does say most of the issue, but the specifics are: I had/have a dual boot Win7, Ubuntu machine and wanted to replace Ubuntu with Fedora 14. I booted from the Fedora cd and was going through the settings when the install froze (I think it was after clicking Next from the partition settings screen) and I had to do a cold shut down of the computer.

The computer now takes a long time to get to the Grub loader (timing out while looking for the cd rom I believe is what is happening) though it seems to boot fine. The problem is that the Windows OS now does not recognize the cd rom, or rather, it is present in the device manager, but will not respond via the OS (cannot be accessed via command line nor gui) nor from pushing the "Open" button on the hardware itself. It seems as if the device has been locked at some lower level.

Any idea how to 'unlock' the device? I can't boot from the cd anymore (the bios recognizes the presence of the device, but that is it) and I don't know how else to rectify the situation. I haven't tried booting to ubuntu yet (as I don't think anything was actually changed while attempting the Fedora install) but I am new enough to linux as to not know what to do if I could boot to it.

Any ideas? I'd really like to keep my Win7 install, but at a real loss here.

Thanks

You might try booting Ubuntu and using eject -i 0.
I got this idea from
http://fossplanet.com/f10/%5Btip%5D-...-ubuntu-77367/

If that doesn't work then I would shut down the computer, unplug the CD drive power cable and use a paper clip to open the drive door. Then I would plug the power cable back in and start the computer.

thanks!

I'll try it when I get home (at work at the moment). I had something similar happen within windows a couple of months back, but it happened when a dvd I was burning failed and the dvd software had locked the drive. I had to launch the app again to unlock the drive-sadly I couldn't unlock the drive this time with the dvd software.

be well

That worked!

Thanks for the help.

be well