Hi. I have a small problem with the CD-RW drive on my PC (dual boot Win98 and Linux Ubuntu 5.10 kernel 2.6.12-10-686). Most times, the OS boots up fine. Occasionally however, without any apparent reason, the indicator light on my CD-RW drive keeps blinking during boot (normally it blinks a few times during the POST or BIOS stage then goes off), the Ubuntu boot then reverts to the full text mode instead of the normal graphic mode. After some delay Ubuntu starts but the CD is not mounted. The problem starts during the boot stage and may even involve the BIOS - if the light is still blinking by the time I choose my OS, the CD will not be recognised, whether I choose Linux or Windows.

My /etc/fstab includes:
/dev/hdc /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto 0 0

The following are the relevant lines from dmesg for a 'normal' linux boot with nothing in the drive:
[4294674.216000] hdc: HL-DT-ST GCE-8525B, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
[4294676.944000] hdc: ATAPI 52X CD-ROM CD-R/RW drive, 2048kB Cache
[4294676.944000] Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.20
[4294697.424000] cdrom: open failed.

This problem has appeared since I loaded Ubuntu Linux as an alternative OS. Does anyone have any suggestions on what is causing this or what diagnostic steps I might take? Thanks, Pat.

Even though your /etc/fstab file says noauto it looks like the drive is being auto mounted for some reason. Make sure there are no other entries in /etc/fstab that point to /dev/hdc or /dev/cdrom.

No luck there, Bin Bash, but thanks for the suggestion. It appears as if the CD-RW drive is locked into a "busy state" right from the start of the boot sequence, that is before Linux and fstab is even loaded. But something in Linux seems to be leaving it in that state, presumably at the previous shutdown. Next time it happens, I will let Linux boot and post the results of dmesg.

Meanwhile, if anyone has any comments on how Linux fiddles with any CD drive hardware settings at shutdown, I would be interested to hear. Cheers, Pat.

Also make sure you don't have KsCD autoloading. KsCD can cause problems especially if the drive is empty when it starts.