[techtalk] ejecting the #$%#$! cdrom

Telsa Gwynne hobbit at aloss.ukuu.org.uk
Tue May 30 15:15:48 EST 2000


On Tue, May 30, 2000 at 01:50:02AM +0800 or thereabouts, Samantha Atkins wrote:
> Once in a  while Linux (RH 6.2) will insist that a cdrom is busy and
> thus will not let me umount it and thus will not let me eject it.  After

I know the feeling. I meet this occasionally with RH 6.1. 

> looking all over the system, bring down X and looking again, I am
> convinced I have no process active that has any business hanging on to
> this thing.  And none of the other machines have the thing mounted
> remotely.  So what the hell gives?

The thing that invariably causes me to kick myself is when I discover
a shell on a minimised window or a forgotten virtual console in which
I have cd'd to /mnt/cdrom and then left myself in that directory. It
won't let you umount it them.

On the other hand, I have also had problems unmounting filesystems: 
over NFS as well as with CDs; in one case rpm would spit out error
messages about not being able to find /mnt/video (mounted from another 
machine: other machine was subsequently rebooted before I had done 
umount, if that is relevant) when I was simply trying to install or 
upgrade rpms which had no reason to touch that directory. 

> Do I actually have to reboot just to get the @*$E!  CD out?  That would
> pretty darn ironic.  Oh yes, my Linux never needs rebooting EXCEPT if it
> loses its mind and want let go of the cd!   It is a data CD. I am
> running under Gnome.  

There is an application which can be turned on with RH and Gnome 
called magicdev which goes around and mounts floppies and CDs for
you, whether you want it to or not. I loathe the little beastie.
But that couldn't be involved here, could it?

I suspect you have already looked at all of these. I'm only really
mentioning them just in case! I am sure I have actually met (in 
addition to the lot above) the problem you are describing. Unfortunately,
I cannot think what I did to fix it. I'll think harder...

Good luck!

Telsa






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