Q. I've Ubuntu Linux Installed on HP Desktop system. When I press the eject button my DVD / CD nothing happens. Linux is not ejecting my CD and I had to reboot my computer to just get CD out of drive. How do I fix this issue?
A. You don't have to reboot the system to just eject CD / DVD from drive. Sometime Linux locks down your CD / DVD if a process reading / accessing file / directory on that DVD / CD.
Getting Your CD/DVD Out Of Drive
Simply right click on CD / DVD icon and select Eject / Unmount option. Press eject button to get the cd/dvd out. If this failed, try following method to eject the cd:
Find Out CD/DVD drive mount location
Run df or mount command to find out location, enter the following at terminal / shell prompt:
$ df
Sample output:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2 92G 22G 66G 25% /
varrun 1013M 140K 1013M 1% /var/run
varlock 1013M 0 1013M 0% /var/lock
udev 1013M 88K 1013M 1% /dev
devshm 1013M 0 1013M 0% /dev/shm
lrm 1013M 34M 979M 4% /lib/modules/2.6.22-14-generic/volatile
/dev/sda1 98G 19G 79G 20% /media/sda1
/dev/sda5 274G 185G 89G 68% /share
/dev/scd0 3.5G 3.5G 0 100% /media/cdrom0
Your CD / DVD device name is /dev/scd0 and mounted under /media/cdrom0. Now issue the following command as root:
$ sudo fuser -km /media/cdrom0
OR
# fuser -km /media/cdrom0
Now you should able to eject CD / DVD.
Related: See How to forcefully remove unmount a Linux disk partition / device using lsof and fuser command.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I think there is an alternative to this method. The “eject” command. You can use it from a terminal or simpler from the “Run application” dialog (e.g. Alt+F2 in Gnome).
You might also try disallowing the kernel from locking the cdrom. Sometimes a rogue process will hold onto the drive for no real reason. This way is often much cleaner than killing the process.
# Temporarily unlock the cdrom
echo 0 > /proc/sys/dev/cdrom/lock
# Permanently unlock the cdrom
echo “sys.dev.cdrom.lock=0″ >> /etc/sysctl.conf
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