Ejecting CDs are Frustrating

Lukas Sabota punkrockguy318 at comcast.net
Mon Jul 25 12:14:06 CDT 2005


Lukas Sabota wrote:

> Hey,
> Ejecting CDs, especially Audio CDs, in Ubuntu can be quite 
> frustrating.  Often times when I would like to eject a CD from my 
> desktop, I get a descriptive error that says: "Unable to eject media" 
> and "Show more details".  Alright, I would like to find out more 
> details of the problem.  My details are "eject: unable to eject, last 
> error: Invalid Argument".  Hmm, not quite the details I was looking 
> for.  That doesn't help me solve my problem at all.
> So my next step is to umount the drive through the command line.
> lukas at gnarley:/$  cd /media/
> lukas at gnarley:/media$  umount cdrom0/
> umount: /media/cdrom0 is not mounted (according to mtab)
> What? My CD is mounted! I see it on the desktop
> lukas at gnarley:/media$  cd cdrom0
> lukas at gnarley:/media/cdrom0$ ls
> Nothing?  Odd, where are my audio tracks?
>
> Alright, why don't I try to eject from the command line?
>
> lukas at gnarley:~$ eject
> eject: unable to eject, last error: Invalid argument
>
> Hmm, that desciptive error message is showing up again.  Odd.
>
> So it looks like we have two problems here:
> The first and less severe is that audio tracks are not mounted to the 
> file system, there are just visible in nautilous.  Quite odd.  I 
> believe there is a kernel patch or something that allows the mounting 
> of audio CDs, am I right?
> The second is that the CD will not eject unless you use a pin or 
> restart the machine. Even if there is some error with the CD media, 
> there is no reason for my computer to keep the CD in the trey.  That 
> is quite obtrusive.  And even if Ubuntu has a good reason for keeping 
> my CD in the drive, I have no idea what that is.  "eject: unable to 
> eject, last error: Invalid argument" gives me no insight whatsoever.
>
> I do believe this is a software problem and not a hardware problem, as 
> this has happened through many CD drives.
>
> Luke
>
There is also one other alternative to ejecting the cd:
lukas at gnarley:/dev$ sudo eject -s
Password:
eject: unable to eject, last error: Invalid argument
lukas at gnarley:/dev$

This ejects the CD, but still prints the error message.  One shouldn't 
require root privileges to eject a CD.

What's the deal with that?

Luke



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