Airs – Ian Lance Taylor

CD-ROM drives

I had an interesting experience this weekend. I bought some Fedora 9 CDs in order to easily upgrade a new laptop. Since I had them, I decided to upgrade one of my desktops from a CD rather than over the net (I usually install over the net, but, sadly but understandably, installing from CD tends to have a fewer glitches). So I pushed the button on my CD-ROM drive to open the holder. I heard a grinding noise, and the holder didn’t come out. I pried it out with a jack-knife, but, predictably, it then wouldn’t go back in. I removed the drive and opened it up, and a couple of pieces fell out. I have no skill with hardware, so my chances of repairing it were zero.

This particular desktop, about four years old, happened to be my newest one. However, I have several other desktops in various states of disrepair, so I figured I would just swap in a new CD-ROM drive. After 90 minutes of unscrewing various computers, I discovered that I now have four broken CD-ROM drives and zero working ones. Three of the CD-ROM drives didn’t open. The fourth one worked well enough to boot Fedora, but failed as soon as I tried to read the whole disk.

This is just another lesson in why computers should have no moving parts. I’ve ordered a refurbished CD-ROM drive for $10, plus $8 shipping. I’ll see whether the cheap approach works.

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3 responses to “CD-ROM drives”

  1. ilyak Avatar
    ilyak

    Mine still work. I don’t remember any of my drives ever failing completely (but some of them had degraded perfomance, glitches during read and write).

    Maybe you’ve got some extra bad drives there?

  2. etbe Avatar
    etbe

    http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/06/01/shelf-life-of-hardware/

    I’ve had problems with CD-ROMs failing in the past, see the above blog post for some of my experiences (the main one being four dead drives in two days).

    Currently I’m trying to replace my CD-ROM drives with DVD drives, as I periodically deploy desktop PCs running Linux as routers I sometimes get the chance to replace a DVD drive with a CD-ROM drive before deployment.

    As for the cost of buying the drive, maybe you should have just got a couple of DVD drives, spending half the money on shipping isn’t good value and it’s the kind of thing you will need regularly.

  3. Ian Lance Taylor Avatar
    Ian Lance Taylor

    ilyak: I certainly might have bad drives, though they were all bought at different times. It probably has more to do with the number of times they’ve been moved.

    etbe: this is the first time I’ve tried to use a CD-ROM drive in a few years, and it’s hardly critical, so spending as little money as possible seemed like the right approach.

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