Laptop CD drive only reads DVDs under Linux

[GJones]

My Aspire 3680 laptop can boot fine from a Windows install CD using its internal CD drive. It can also read CDs fine under Windows using that drive.

But it cannot boot from a Linux CD using GRUB or syslinux. The CD spins up, spins down, spins up, spins down... And never gets read.

Furthermore the CD drive cannot read CDs on a booted Linux system. Again, the CD drive never reads the disk, and no messages are left in dmesg...

But DVDs always work! The laptop can boot from them, and read them under both Linux and Windows.

The CD drive used to work perfectly on Linux, but I don't suspect a kernel regression - that wouldn't cover the dodgy bootloader behavior I've seen. Got to be a hardware issue, right? But what kind of hardware issue? I cleaned the drive lens, cleaned the CDs, made sure everything was free of dust... Nothing doing. What's wrong with the drive?

[gapan]

This certainly sounds like a hardware problem. Maybe the drive is not reading the discs fast enough. I've seen that happen before. In that case the OS would recognize discs fine, but it wasn't possible to boot from them because it wouldn't read the disc fast enough. I could hear the drive struggle to read the CD, but it showed a "No disc in drive" message before it could realize it was there. This was with a "tired" drive, after a few years of use and lots of CD and DVD ripping. So maybe your drive is just getting old.

[jayseye]

If a BIOS update is available, that might help with booting. Meanwhile, would booting from USB be an acceptable work-around?

[thenktor]

Indeed that sounds weird. But nowadays it shouldn't be that hard to find a replacement drive. Perhaps eome friend of you still has an unused drive lounging around so that you can test it?

[mimosa]

Or try testing from another live distro. Puppy 4.3.1 doesn't need the disk in the drive once it has booted, and has good hardware recognition. Obviously, you'd have to use a DVD even though it's only 100 MB or so

[GJones]

Haven't tried Puppy yet, but so far no live distro has gotten the CD drive working.

Also, the drive doesn't read CDs in Windows Vista, only in XP. Odd.