Bug 240079

Summary:	need a way to eject bad disks during the install rather than waiting
Product:	[openSUSE] openSUSE 10.2	Reporter:	Michael Wolf <maw>
Component:	Installation	Assignee:	E-mail List <yast2-maintainers>
Status:	RESOLVED INVALID	QA Contact:	Jiri Srain <jsrain>
Severity:	Enhancement
Priority:	P5 - None
Version:	Final
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	Other
OS:	Other
Whiteboard:
Found By:	Other	Services Priority:
Business Priority:		Blocker:	---
Marketing QA Status:	---	IT Deployment:	---

Description Michael Wolf 2007-01-29 23:23:26 UTC

If you insert a CD during the installation process that's bad, sometimes the CD drive will grind seemingly indefinitely.  If you know it's a coaster there should be a way to eject it.

The workaround is to pop the CD drive with a paperclip (if the drive lets you!).  YaST will ask you to insert the CD again, at which point you can insert a known good disk.

Comment 1 Michael Wolf 2007-01-30 00:10:00 UTC

Turns out that's not a very good workaround either :(  I just ruined my drive in the process.  Doh doh doh.

(At least it was a very cheap drive.)

Comment 2 J. Daniel Schmidt 2007-02-01 14:55:57 UTC

(In reply to comment #0)
> If you know it's a coaster there should be a way to eject it.

If you know it's a coaster don't even insert it in the first place.
You c/should perform a media check at the very beginning of the installation if you use recordable CDs or DVDs.

The popup window that waits for the new media to be inserted already provides an eject button. If you closed the popup you can run "eject" from the command line (switch to console).

Your suggestion would mean to provide an everlasting eject button somewhere.


HuHa: Any idea? Could there be a timeout when waiting for new CDs - probably something like: As long as installation is waiting for new media, come back every 3 minutes to the media popup to offer an eject button again.

Comment 3 Stefan Hundhammer 2007-02-01 15:07:33 UTC

Uh - exactly what do you expect here?

As long as the CD is spinning in the drive, it gets accessed. If the CD in the drive is so bad that it cannot be read, it also cannot be ejected. This is not an issue of YaST2, it's a generic CD-ROM issue.

The generic approach to that kind of problem is:

- Get a shell

- Find out what process accesses the device and kill it to stop the read   
  attempts:

    fuser -mk /dev/hdc
    (or whatever device it is)

- Unmount:  umount /dev/hdc

- Eject:    eject /dev/hdc

Or, simple but drastic: Hit Ctrl-Alt-Del to reboot. Ever user (in particular those familiar with MS Windows) knows how to do that.


As Daniel wrote in comment #2, the only other way would be a button in YaST2 that would always be present and accessible, and a separate thread to monitor presses on that button.

I bet that a lot more users would be utterly confused with such a button than there would be users benefiting from it. And in all my 7+ years of working on YaST2 no other user seemed to have that kind of problem, or at least there was none who didn't know how to hit Ctrl-Alt-Del.