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I've run into a Sun external CD-ROM drive that won't accept a CD, and am hoping one of my friends (or anyone else reading my journal) will have some helpful clue ...

The Sun does see the drive when it does a SCSI probe, but can't mount it. Any CD inserted is ejected a few seconds later, regardless of what the computer is trying to do or whether the SCSI cable is disconnected; as far as I can tell the problem is with the drive itself. The owner has tried several CDs, three different caddies, and has even swapped the drive ... but he says he thinks the drive he swapped in might have been previously swapped out for having the same problem some time ago. So I'm wondering whether this is a known problem with a particular family of drives, ideally with some cheap and easy solution. The computer does seem to know that the drive is empty if I type a 'mount' command without a CD inserted, but just retries and times out if it starts with a CD in place which is then spit out by the drive while 'mount' is attempting to do its thing.

This is a Sun Model 411 case with a sticker that says it's part number 595-3063-01. At least one of the two he has, anyhow; the other is in a 411 case but I didn't get a look at the sticker on the bottom. It's attached to a SparcStation 2 with a pair of Seagate hard disks inside, and is set up to run proprietary Kodak software (in fact, the front doesn't say "Sun" or "Sparc"-anything, just Kodak). The owner had already swapped out the motherboard, the hard drives, the SCSI cables, the SCSI terminator, and, as previously mentioned, the external CD-ROM unit, before I showed up.

The problem first showed up after a power failure over a weekend. (Apparently the system is not designed to be shut down frequently, and the startup procedure is a bit awkward; it looks like something designed fifteen or twenty years before Sparcs even existed.) The Sun didn't want to boot of its hard disks at first, then mysteriously decided to do so after all. When it did, I didn't see any fsck complaints on the console, but I'll want to run fsck manually the next time I'm there Just In Case. The documented startup procedure has it booting from a CD containing the Kodak software, but there was also a script in /etc on the hard disk to set the date (not Y2K compliant), mount the CD, and execute the software on the CD.

There are also a film scanner and a CD writer attached, which didn't show up in the list of SCSI devices, but which make the Sun did complain about bus errors during boot if they were turned off. I'm not ruling out SCSI Voodoo, but I don't think it's a SCSI problem.

I've got a 595-3096-01 drive (also in a 411 enclosure) that I plan to take out there to try, but I'll probably be needing that for my own machines at home sometime.

I'm hoping this is a quick-fix situation, but if this is simply The Way These Drives Die, can I get away with throwing a $10 used CD-ROM from Computer Renaissance into that 411 enclosure? (Failing that, I wonder whether I can copy the software to the hard disk and tweak it to run from there instead of the CD drive ... Hmm.)

And yes, the next time I'm there, I'm going to repeat my suggestion that he get an UPS.