From: Anthony Anson Sent: 21 February 2005 11:42 63F7A21F1CA18143AFDBF28E2A7D6BBAE5E132@endor.kewill-europe.com from "Keith Watson" keith.watson@kewill.com contains these words:
I had to close Debian down before the CD drive would
operate again.
This happens to me every now and then. I find that opening a command shell and su'ing to root then issuing "eject /cdrom" (or
whatever the
CD mount point is) usually works.
The words have a familiar ring to them - but I'm not up to speed at using terminals yet, so...
Easy-peasy if you're using Debian (or any one of half a dozen other distros).
hold down alt and then press F1 (or F2, F3, F4.....) and a command session will appear (to get back to the desktop just hold down alt and press F7 - if you're using Debian that is :o) ).
Then at the logon prompt type 'root' and at the password prompt type your root password (which I assume you know?)
Type 'df' to get a list of what is mounted where.
one of the lines will say something like;
\dev\hdd [a number] [a number] [a number] 100% /cdrom
where the first bit refers to the CD rom device (it might be hde, hdf depending on how many HDDs you have or it might be emulated as a SCSI device e.g. /dev/scd0 or /dev/scd1)
the last bit on the line is the directory where your CD is mounted.
so you can then enter 'eject /dev/hdd' (or 'eject /dev/scd0' or whatever depending on which device the drive is set up as)
or you can enter the mount point e.g. 'eject /cdrom' (I prefer this as I can never remember what device the CD drive is but I can remember where it's mounted :o) )
then when you're finished just type 'logout' (or hold down ctrl and press D) and then alt+F7.
et voila!
PS when you've done this successfully at least once you can save pressure on your memory by using 'history | grep eject' to get a list from the command history where you've used this command before. Note the number before one of the commands (one that worked that is :o) ) and just type an exclaimation mark ( ! ) followed by the number to re-execute the command eg. if you get;
5 eject /cdrom 12 eject /cdrom 24 eject /cdrom
you can type !5 or !12 or !24 to re-execute the command.
Regards,
Keith ____________ Stand still. - The trees ahead and the bush beside you are not lost. - Albert Einstein