[PLUG] Optical drive failure?

John Jason Jordan johnxj at comcast.net
Fri Jan 8 22:37:54 UTC 2016


On Thu, 7 Jan 2016 20:17:47 -0800
Dale Snell <ddsnell at frontier.com> dijo:

>On Thu, 7 Jan 2016 18:33:30 -0800, in message
>20160107183330.01ccb158 at Devil-Bonobo, John Jason Jordan wrote:
>
>> Lately programs complain that they can't read the media in the
>> Bluray drive in my laptop. Dmesg reports hundreds of errors like the
>> following:
>> 
>> [551454.265635] end_request: I/O error, dev sr0, sector 1412
>> [551454.265638] Buffer I/O error on device sr0, logical block 353
>> 
>> The errors are so thick that I can't even play a movie now, yet the
>> problems started quite suddenly - last week it was working fine.
>> 
>> The drive is just a little over two years old, and has had moderate
>> use. It has rarely been used with Bluray media; mostly just ordinary
>> DVDs. It's a Matshita BD-MLT UJ260AF. 
>> 
>> I inspected it with a magnifying glass and I didn't see anything
>> obviously wrong, but then, I have no idea what to look for. 
>> 
>> Before I take it out of the computer and buy a replacement, I thought
>> I'd ask for suggestions.

>Those certainly look like hardware failures to me.  Before
>replacing the drive, though, there are a couple of things you can
>try.  One, the drive's SATA cable might be defective.  Try
>replacing it with a known good one.  Two, the computer's SATA
>controller might have gone bad.  Try using a different port.  If
>neither of those work, I would guess that the drive itself has
>gone bad.

No cables - it's in a laptop. It just plugs in. Not to say there can't
be a connection issue, but if there is it would probably require
replacing the motherboard.

First thing this morning I decided to reboot (which I hate doing).
Afterward the drive worked perfectly, but only for one movie. When it
was over I unmounted and ejected the disk, then inserted a different
movie disk. Now it's back like it was before - constant error messages
like the ones I quoted above.

Next I unmounted the whole drive, /dev/sr0), with:

	sudo umount /dev/sr0

The command executed without error, but when I then inserted a DVD it
was immediately recognized and mounted. My command did not do what
I thought it might do. And the read errors continue as before. 

Since it worked perfectly after rebooting I am wondering if there might
be a software issue rather than a physical failure. I was hoping that
unmounting the whole drive would 'reset' it so it would work again, but
that theory has failed, or at least my command was not the way to do it.
Clearly, I can't keep rebooting just to change the media. Maybe my
command above was not the way to do it. Is there anything else I can do
so it completely goes away and then comes back?



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