[Tfug] CDs: no medium found, DVDs work (sometimes)

[JD Rogers]

Hi All,

I think I may have even posted on this before, but I got inspired
today to try to fix this issue, and I'm stuck. I don't use cds that
much which is both good and bad, since I think this problem first
showed up sometime around 1 year ago with ubuntu 9.4 or maybe 9.10.

I have three workstations: 2 with identical hardware, 1 with a
different MB/CPU, but with the same cdrom drive.

I can rule out hardware for 2 reasons: all three systems consistently
fail to read CDs. DVD's seem to mount ok 'sometimes' - maybe 1/2-2/3
of the time.

Symptoms:
insert disk, disk spins, drive light blinks, eventually nothing. No
messages in dmesg. If I use "lshw -c disk", I see 'status=busy' for a
while and then eventually 'status=nodisc'.

When the data DVD fails to mount, the symptoms are the same, but it
clearly works sometimes, so the cables are fine, the disks I'm testing
with are all fine (checked in other computers).

If I try to "cat /dev/sr0" with the disk in, it says "cat: /dev/sr0:
No medium found"

ANY ideas on how to further debug this would be great.
Thanks,
JDR