the amazing non-closing CDROM drive.

[Steve Post]

The CDROM drive on my old B180L computer keeps opening. I put in a CD, it pops out. I just close the drawer with no CD. It pops out.

(I suppose I would DUCT TAPE the bugger closed. But I'm pretty sure it would mess up the drive).

The interesting thing is.....
I hooked up an external cdrom drive and it started to do the same thing.

Anyone ever see this?

Since it affects 2 different CDROM drives, I am guessing it has something to do with the scsi bus.

I not really expecting much of an answer. It is no longer supported. I have no hardware support on it. Still it would be nice to know if someone else has seen this problem and knows what the cause/solution is.

steve

[Steven Schweda]

I've seen drives refuse to open with an
unterminated SCSI bus, but that was not with
the same drive models as yours.

[Pete Randall]

Steve,

Can you mount the CD real quick when it first closes or if you hold it in?


Pete

[Marco A.]

Have you checked the syslog, stm ? for I/O erros, firmware issues.

Maybe they show something about it.

After doing what that started to happen ?

Regards,


Marco

[Steve Post]

It won't stay closed. I try to hold it in. It pushes out. I can keep it from opening only by removing POWER then manually pushing it in.

Once power comes back.....
The internal cdrom drive would pop out.
IF I remove the power and unplug the scsi cable and manually push it in, the external cdrom drive would stay closed. Once I plug the scsi into the port it pops right out again.

I plugged in a tape drive on the same scsi bus, and it works fine.

The type of bus is LVD single ended.

Maybe there is a problem with termination. But if that is the case, I would have expected it to happen for the last 5 years and not just recently.

It STARTED to happen one day when I put in a cdrom. It popped back out. I pushed it in. It popped back out. I removed the cd and pushed the empty cd tray back in. It popped back out. (conditions repeat...forever).

[Marco A.]

what about the errors ? stm ? scsi state i/o ?

Maybe a preacher could be helpful !!!... =) !!

Regards,

[Steven Schweda]

> The type of bus is LVD single ended.

LVD = Low-Voltage Differential

Single-ended = not differential.

It's probably not both at the same time.

> [...] and not just recently.

Plausible. Nothing else has changed on the
bus recently? Where did you connect the
external drive for testing? (Same bus or
another one?) What all is on the bus(es)?
(At which SCSI IDs?)

> I not really expecting much of an answer.

That's good. As questions go, it wasn't very
good, either. A bit more useful info from
you on your configuration might reduce the
time-wasting guesswork.

[Steve Post]

OK OK!
I'll admit it. I ignored the darned annoying thing for a year. Now I need the cdrom drive.

I didn't worry about until last night when I happened to reboot the bugger for a simple test.

It died booting up. So I wanted to restore from old hpux11.0 cd's. The error (which refuses to stay on the screen...) had these strings in it.

panic....type 9 .....can't find file descriptor

I can restore from an ignite tape. I'll see if that works first.

How could I ignore this problem for so long?
Do I care about the data on this server? Not really. It has been sitting under my desk since June 2000. It has been a glorified xterminal.

So, I can't provide any debugging information since the box is actually...uh...DEAD. But the ignite TAPE seems to be running along fine. I'll find out in the future.

[Marco A.]

Well, that error is not for this issue ...

It's hard to understand it if the system is not giving a lot of information...

Have you tried a firmware upgrade !!!?, some units could be upgraded!

Rgds

[Steve Post]

I'm not wasting my time with a firmware upgrade on anything here. I really just wanted to know if anyone has seen this cd ejecting problem.

meanwhile......

My ignite TAPE (ie not cd) worked great.

I suppose I could rip the box open, unhook the cd rom, plug in the external cdrom then see if the external cdrom continues to open on its own?

I'll do that when I have time. At least it's up and working. Thanks for the help.
Steve

[Vijay Dsouza]

Steve,
Try reseating the interface cable connected from the scsi bus to this Drive at both ends and secondly.I have faced such an issue on an IDE drive where i had found the power input (From the SMPS) to the drive faulty.Swapped the SMPS and things worked fine . Not sure if this helps but you can try reseating the connections to this drive.

Cheers

Vijay

[Marcel Burggraeve · Accepted solution]

I've seen the same symptoms once a couple of years ago in a D-Class system.
It was the internal cdrom drive opening all the time no matter what you did.
Replacing the cdrom drive solved the problem.
After that we tested the cdrom drive on several systems and it still kept opening all the time so conclusion was it is broken.

Maybe you're just unlucky by having two broken cdrom drives ?

[Mark Ellzey]

Steve,

I've had the same thing happen on a K-series. The CD just kept popping out, regardless if a CD was in the drive or not.

I solved the problem by putting another CD drive in the box. So I'm guessing that it's just a bad CD drive.

Regards,
Mark

[TwoProc]

Steve, the admission of deception was key to make your able to help yourself (step 3 of 12) ! HA! :-) :-)

Anyways, something that you check quickly is that most of the LVD devices from HP actually aren't, what they were was just standard regular se scsci, with an adapter do-hickey on it to connect it to the LVD cable. Just for giggles, try taking an adapter off of an another device/machine, etc. and using it where this one is. I've seen that little adapter go out, and besides terminators this part could easily explain a "wait 5 years and then break" problem.

Just a guess along with all of the other things to try, and list can almost get infinite. Speaking of, have you checked the air pressure in your tires?

[Steve Post]

My deception was to keep on the question.

A dead computer is a different subject than a CDrom problem. But if I meantioned the dead computer right away, we would have been talking about that instead of why that CD rom keeps ejecting.

I restored with an ignite tape for now.
I'll have to get a screwdriver before I dig into the hardware.

[Eric Firkey]

Hi Steve,

did you resolve this or come to any conclusion because I have a B180L that is doing the same exact thing? I'm trying to install HPUX and the CDRom keeps opening and closing on me. I tried two different CDRoms.

Eric

[Steve Post]

YES. and You have great timing.

We had a pile of old cdrom drives for a compaq system that was working fine. Instead of selling the compaq thing or throwing it out (we were cleaning), I GRABBED IT.

I shutdown the hp box, unplugged it, and opened it up.

I pulled out the CDrom drive and replaced it with one of those compaq CDrom drives. I verified it looked like the same type of drive. It was the exact, same model.

I noted the little pin jumpers on the old, busted hp cdrom, and the new cdrom. I made sure I had the same settings. Since they were the same model, it was pretty darned easy.

I buttoned up the box, applied power and booted it up.

It worked PERFECTLY.

PS:
In other news, I almost used a full can of canned air to remove all the dust.

After opening the box, I had to open another metal box inside. There should be instructions on the inside of the box.

Now that it is working, I upgraded from hpux10.20 to hpux11.0. It worked but I can't get ssh to work. I'm digging through a lot of very old depots. At least hpux11.0 works (w/o ssh).

[TwoProc]

Re: ssh
I might be waaay of here, so if I'm not in the ballpark, just chunk the whole idea. My best guess as to why one would have problems with ssh after an OS upgrade follows along the following lines. Did you move from 32 bit to 64 bit during the conversion? Was the conversion "an upgrade" or was it an install?

If so, you might be having trouble with the new 64 bit math libraries being diff (read: incompatible) with the ssh libraries that are 32 bit - or vice versa. Make sure you've "64 bitted" everything laying around, or you could run into trouble b/c the math libraries are used heavily by the encryption engines for ssh.

[Eric Firkey]

so are you saying it was the cdrom that was defective? or were the jumper settings wrong?

[Dennis Handly]

>TwoProc: Did you move from 32 bit to 64 bit during the conversion?

The HP-UX default is 32 bit, so this is unlikely to be the issue.

>If so, you might be having trouble with the new 64 bit math libraries being diff (read: incompatible)

While it is true the 32 bit math libs may have slightly different results, based on the PA1.1 versions, they are better.

>Make sure you've "64 bitted" everything laying around

This isn't needed on HP-UX unless you want to use a large address space.

[Steve Post]

Don't worry about the ssh thing. That should be a different forum entry.

The cause of my problems was a bad cdrom drive. That is all it was. Nothing else.

[TwoProc]

Dennis:

>TwoProc: Did you move from 32 bit to 64 bit during the conversion?

The HP-UX default is 32 bit, so this is unlikely to be the issue.

Resp: Uh, so no-one - if not most shops didn't change to 64 bit OS at 11.0???? You must be kidding...


>If so, you might be having trouble with the new 64 bit math libraries being diff (read: incompatible)

While it is true the 32 bit math libs may have slightly different results, based on the PA1.1 versions, they are better.

Resp: better/worse... meh. I was talking about *incompatibilities* b/w the DES libraries used by ssh and the math libs, this is because many folks first went to ssh from the ported archives, not from an HPUX distro.
e.g. I don't think that ssh was in the 11.0 distro, so it may have been obtained from the porting archive.

>Make sure you've "64 bitted" everything
laying around

This isn't needed on HP-UX unless you want to use a large address space.

Resp: see above comment about library incompatibilities, same advice, just given differently.