Hi all,
Whenever I start K3b on my Mandrake 10.1 it just freezes trying to initial devices. Though both CD and DVD-R work just fine before starting K3b. Another thing is that all the apps started after the k3b freezes also halt up. Does anybody have any ideas???

yeah something like that happen 2 me, but that was because I ejected the cd while burning, how come I did that? hehehehehe just 2 c what would happen. anyways try 2 re-install the app perhaps that will solve ur problem, also check your logs see if anything was written.

Hi,

This might be a problem with the hardware abstraction layer (HAL) daemon dying - it can be intolerant of small hardware 'glitches' and has a habit of going to sleep. It happened to me with a number of the newer distro's now using HAL (Mandrake 10.1+; FC3; Ubuntu...) on one machine with a flaky CD-ROM.

Have a look in you system logs and see if there are any clues / errors pointing to your CD devices. It's also worth checking the status of hald before and after the problem occurs -

If status code 'D' is returned, hal has gone into 'uninterruptible sleep', and there's no way of restarting it without a reboot! If you don't see any 'D' hal is probably OK (check the ps man page for more information).