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Old July 18th 19, 04:49 PM posted to alt.comp.hardware
VanguardLH[_2_]
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Default hardware or software ? drive coming open randomly

hubops wrote:

I have a Lenovo T500 laptop ; Vista vintage ; running Win 8 Pro
and it has an intermittant problem where the CD/DVD drive pops open
randomly. The drive is ~ never used. When it's acting-up, it
will pop open several times in a few minutes. When it's behaving,
it will be fine for a couple days.


Install any software that monitors the state of your drives (by looking
at the SMART attributes of all accessible drives)?

I remember a long time ago, for example with Creative software, had
something that would keep the CD drive spinning for longer after it was
last accessed under the premise that if it was just accessed then it
might be accessed again within the next few minutes. Problem was that
other software, like drive monitors, would access the drive and
Creative's software would keep the CD drive constantly spinning.

I've had problems with Avira anti-virus in the past. I reported to them
via their forums that my CD/DVD burner drive was spinning up (and then
spun down) at 1-minute intervals. Took awhile to figure out the
culprit, but it was Avira polling the interally-attached drives. A few
other users reported the same problem, but not in sufficient number and
couldn't reproduce the problem (which, to me, was very reproducible
after ever having anything poll the CD drive), so Avira wouldn't expend
any resources to investigate the rarely occurring problem. Not enough
users reporting the problem. Since they've changed their forum setup
(https://answers.avira.com/en/questions), I doubt I could even find my
old forum thread. That was back in 2009 where I noted some software
would queries all discoverable drives to determine their type by
accessing their media (which for an empty CD drive would make that
grinding noise of the head moving to check for media), and then Avira
would begin polling those drives that would keep them spinning. The bug
occurred only on removable drives (disc, floppy). Avira was unable or
ignored the type of access to the drive, like to simply poll as to what
type it was, and assume any access could be a write access. When Avira
got triggered because something else accessed the drive, I'd hear the CD
drive making the head-seak noise at 1-minute intervals. Very annoying.
Problem was exascerbated if you had an old PC with a floppy drive which
was even more noisy at those 1-minute polling intervals by Avira. Any
program that polled the device for its SMART data, like disc burning
software, would trigger Avira into the everlasting 1-minute polling
(until a reboot). Only solution was to uninstall Avira and use
something else (like Avast). It was an old problem which Avira never
specifically addressed, but perhaps new code updates since then have
accidentally stepped on the bug.

You don't say if this is a new problem on an old laptop or if this
problem existed from the moment you got the laptop. If it is a new
problem, load the OS in its safe mode which eliminate the startup
programs when Windows loads. If the problem goes away, you have a
startup program that is causing the problem.