DVD drive trouble
 

My LG dvd drive becomes irresponsive for cca. 5 minutes when any program accidentally searches in it when there is no media in the drive.
When this happens, the drive's led indicator slowly flashes and there is absolutely no way to eject the tray or anything.

This is a very annoying problem, as my favourite media player automatically checks if there is a dvd in the drive on startup, thus the drive will be unusable for 5 minutes afterwards.

The drive is quite a new one, and it used to work well before (i.e. it returned with an error after some sec. in such cases), and I have no idea what changed this behaviour.

The system is a default SuSE 9.1 installation; there are two ide hdds on the primary ide controller, and two dvd drives on the secondary ide controller. DMA is on for all drives (dvd playback would not work well without it).

Could you help me with a hint what causes these long delays?

The automounter (i think it's submount)?

Yes, it is submount.

So?

So the drive worked well for two weeks, and now it does not.

So, there was no hardware change, no re-configuration, it simply began to behave this way.

So, I've seen several default SuSE 9.1 systems where there was no minutes-long delays, and I have seen some where there was.

So, what can be the reason?