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/cdrom0In this example, my CD / DVD device name is /dev/scd0 and mounted under /media/cdrom0. Now issue the following command as root user:
Warning: Following command may result into data loss. Sometime fuser command will kill all process on the system. You have been warned.
$ sudo fuser -km /media/cdrom0
OR
# fuser -km /media/cdrom0
Now you may able to eject CD or DVD from the drive.
See also
Related: See How to forcefully remove unmount a Linux disk partition / device using lsof and fuser command.
9 comment
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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Nice, but my cdrom is not mounted. A disk is stuck in there after some IO errors. I’m guessing a scratch or smudge is on the disk. The drive hardware seems to have given up entirely, and is still locked. The “eject” command is useless:
eject: CD-ROM eject command failed
fuser and lsof show nothing, because the drive is no longer mounted. The program I was running (watching a movie in xine) has long since given up and I was allowed to exit. Xine is not running now.
I suppose I’ll look for a paperclip … :o(
— Nate
have you tried:
$ eject sr0
Nothing here works for me. Drive will not open and I don’t know why. Tried the old paperclip method to force the door open, but of course it doesn’t recognise the disk.
/proc/sys/dev/cdrom/lock = 1 but I can’t overwrite it, even as root. The system knows there is no disk in the drive and nothing is mounted anywhere.
“ps aux | grep cd” shows the following…
root 43 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S< 08:17 0:00 [kmmcd]
Any ideas? I'm just going to do a reboot, but for future reference I'd love to find a solution.
you know if you’re using
sudo echo 0 > lock
it wont work, need to do something like:
sudo bash
echo 0 > lock
You may have to run the umount and fuser commands with sudo on macs.
sudo umount -f /dev/disk1s0
I would recommend extreme caution in attempting “fuser -km /media/cdrom”. I just finished using alt-sysrq to reboot my Debian Wheezy (7) system after “fuser -km /media/cdrom” apparently killed the init process and likely everything else. (Yes, I should have tried the command as a non-root user before trying it as root.) The machine was still answering pings, but the keyboard and console were dead, and sshd was refusing connections. Oh, and the root filesystem needed some (automatic) repairs upon reboot.
This command has turned my Debian Wheezy into vegetable. I strongly recommend not using it.