CD and DVD drives won't open, sometimes

[Dood]

A friend asked me about this problem, sometimes his CD and DVD drives won't open, always happens to them both at the same time. Then eventually they both start working again. I have no idea what would cause two separate drives to act this way. Anyone?

[jankerson]

System resources.

I bet they open after he reboots.

Try getting him to clean out his startup and do a disk cleanup etc.

[Steve R Jones]

I too am betting that a reboot solves the problem But, we’ll need to know for sure…

Intermittent issues are pretty tough to solve. We could list out 80 things to try and it might take weeks to find out if they worked or not.

Your friend could start a manual log file. Have him jot down everything he was doing prior to trying and open the trays. He might find some common thing he was doing or application he was using that could be causing the problem……

[atapi]

hi, i had a similar problem in that when i put a cd-rw disc in my old cd writer, after i had written to it, it wouldnt eject the disc untill i restarted the machine. what solved the problem for me was using a free disc eject program called 'DDCDE'
here is a link-->
http://www.download.com/DDCDes/3000-2094_4-4591515.html

[Dood]

Thanks, all good ideas. I do think some program is tying things up and not letting him eject, I think he said it happens after he burns a disc, so I told him to try Ctrl Alt Del next time to see what's running. Though he didn't say, I'm pretty sure everything works after a reboot.

[Dood]

hi, i had a similar problem in that when i put a cd-rw disc in my old cd writer, after i had written to it, it wouldnt eject the disc untill i restarted the machine. what solved the problem for me was using a free disc eject program called 'DDCDE'
here is a link-->
http://www.download.com/DDCDes/3000-2094_4-4591515.html

Any other sources for that program? I get a 404 for the homepage and all the searches I did for the program try to download it from the homepage: http://ddhomepage.nm.ru/download/ddcdesv2.exe

[Dood]

I was wrong. The drives do NOT always work after a reboot.

[jankerson]

Tell him to replace the IDE cable and set the jumpers to Cable Select on both drives.

Sometimes a cable could be going and cause some problems like that.

[atapi]

Dood, here is a yousendit.com link to DDCDes.exe-->

http://s38.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=1...H2QN9O7MF82MXY

[Dood]

Thanks!

[Dood]

He re-seated his cables and all seems to be well. Thanks for all the help.