23 Dec

grinding cd/dvd reader

Yesterday, I backed up my /home/kae directory, formatted the computer, and installed Windows XP. Why? Because I felt the need to spend the next week playing the Thief and Dungeon Keeper games series. I really wanted to do it through ’98 (yes, I still have the licenses for these OSes), but couldn’t get drivers for my laptop for Windows 98 – the Acer TravelMate 2420 just will not work in Win98…

So anyway – a blissful day later, I decided I should put my system back together. Installed Partition Manager, shuffled the hard-drive around to make space, and got the Fedora 8 disc from the latest Linux Format (/nice/ desktop theme, lads! Much better than that weird balloon crap in FC7).

Stuck the DVD in, rebooted, and …GRIND…

oh dear… tried again. …GRIND…

tried with one of the games CDs that had been working fine for the last day …GRIND…

I worried about this for a few minutes before opening the drive up and taking a look to see if there was something blocking the lens’s path. nope.

It took me a while to notice though that the lens was parked on the /outside edge/ of where a disk would be. As the file allocation table for a CD/DVD is held on the inner rim of the disk, it does not make sense for the lens to be parked far from it when not in use.

I pushed the lens platform in with my finger. I really don’t like doing things like that, as I might be breaking something by doing it, but as the system was already screwed, this was a viable solution.

On rebooting, everything worked fine.

What seems to have happened is that at some point over the last few hours, the lens platform must have moved a little bit too far and was unable to return to its usual route. I am not sure why that happened, as I can only imagine it would happen if I was over-burning something, which I haven’t done in a long time.

Anyway – back to resetting my system, and then back to Dungeon Keeper!

ps: this post, boring as it is, is out there purely because I spent a while trying to find the cause of the noise and disc-drive failure and had to figure it out myself in the end – hopefully someone else searching for “grinding noises dvd” will find this post useful.

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