My CD-RW drive will occasionally not eject a CD

Rooster697

Junior Member
Aug 28, 2001
15
0
0
Hello,

This problem is frustating. I have a LG CED-8120B 12X CD-RW drive. It works just fine. However, occasionally after burning a few CDs in a row, the drive door will no longer open. Right-clicking on the drive in Explorer and selecting Eject has no effect, nor does the hardware button on the CD-RW face work either. If I reboot, it works fine again and I can burn many more CD-Rs in a row. The fact that rebooting solves the problem indicates that heat is not an issue. Just to see what would happen, when the problem occured I left the CD it had just burned in the drive for 2 days, trying every time I remembered to see if it would eject. It would not. As soon as I rebooted, it ejected the CD.

The CD which gets stuck in the drive (different one every time) is totally accessible. I can get to any file on it, it seems to work just fine. Everything seems to continue to work, there is no indication anywhere that there is a problem. The drive is recognized in Explorer, and in Device Manager. There are no error messages in Event Viewer. I have tried a little utility called CD-Eject when I was searching for a solution to this problem, but it failed to eject the CD as well. I am sure the little emergency hole in the front panel of the CD-RW drive would work, however LG recommends to only use this as a last resort and only when the power is off to the drive. Obviously, once the power is off, with the next reboot I can simply eject the CD without having to use the emergency eject function.

Any ideas? It is frustrating to have to reboot every time a CD will not eject, particularly when I have 10 or more to burn in a row.

I am using :

XP Pro with a large number of SP1 patches
Athlon 1.4
512 MBs DDR-RAM
Abit KG7-Lite motherboard
LG 12X CED-8120B CD-RW drive
Toshiba 8X SD-M1212 DVD drive
Leadtek GeForce 3 Ti 200 128 MB
Quantum Fireball 40 GB drive
Quantum Fireball 18 GB drive
Logitech Cordless Desktop
3COM 905TX 10/100 Ethernet adapter
Sigma Designs Hollywood + DVD accelerator card
Creative Labs SB Live 1024
Texas Instruments IEEE 1394 Host adapter (Firewire)
Netgear RT314 Gateway Router
Motorola SB4100 Surfboard Cable Modem
Epson Stylus Photo 895 printer

Thanks,
Rooster:disgust:
 

powerMarkymark

Platinum Member
Jan 29, 2002
2,164
0
0
Happens to me too. Also tried everything that you tried.

With Nero I have found that the eject medium button WORKS! Only thing that does work when the problem pops up on my rig. (big Bertha Rig in sig)

Are you using Nero?

HTH


Mark
 

Rooster697

Junior Member
Aug 28, 2001
15
0
0
:D

Yes I am. And it WORKS! I can't believe it, I have been trying to find the solution to this problem for ages! Nero appears to be the only program which will successfully eject the CD. Of course that implies that Nero is at fault, and is locking the drive, but I don't care! The CD will now eject using Nero.

Thanks for your reply,
Rooster
 

Derango

Diamond Member
Jan 1, 2002
3,113
1
0
If a program, like nero, is using the CD-RW for somthing, it will lock the drive so you can't eject the disk while its burning/doing somthing to the CD. This is considered a good thing.
 

Woodchuck2000

Golden Member
Jan 20, 2002
1,632
1
0
Originally posted by: Derango
If a program, like nero, is using the CD-RW for somthing, it will lock the drive so you can't eject the disk while its burning/doing somthing to the CD. This is considered a good thing.
The problem is that the drive becomes locked, even if nero is closed. Of course it's a good thing to stop the drive opening when you're burning a CD, but afterwards it's nice to be able to remove it...
 

Rooster697

Junior Member
Aug 28, 2001
15
0
0
In response to :
"If a program, like nero, is using the CD-RW for somthing, it will lock the drive so you can't eject the disk while its burning/doing somthing to the CD. This is considered a good thing. "

The difficulty is that I believe Nero is locking the drive after the burn is done. Obviously I am not trying to eject the media while the CD is burning. After Nero is done and it has presented me with the "Burn Process Successful" message, I shut down Nero. This will automatically eject the CD (that is the way I have it configured). I then put the CD back in to check for a good burn. If it is good (it always is with Nero), I eject it again. It is this second eject which occasionally ceases to function. Normally I can just either use Explorer or the hardware eject button to eject the CD. However, sometimes it simply will not eject and the only way I could get the CD out of the drive was to reboot. This only happens once in a while, most of the time the CD will eject just fine.

Now that I have the answer, I just leave Nero running in the background if I have a lot of CDs to burn. Nero ejects them every time when I click on the Eject Media button. There is little doubt this is a bug in Nero as this only occurs after multiple CD burns, and after Nero has been shut down.

However, there is equally little doubt that my method of burning many CDs is exacerbating the problem in Nero. I would simply launch and shut down Nero too many times in succession. Somewhere along the line, after many launches and shutdowns of Nero, it would disable both Explorer's ability to eject the CD as well as the hardware button's. I would say it likely that Nero is not cleaning up fully after itself, nor is it releasing the resources as it should, because of the way I use it. Now that I know this, I simply leave Nero running instead of shutting it down and use Nero's Eject Media button to eject the CD in all instances.

Works like a charm.

Cheers,
Rooster.