CD drawer keeps opening?

[RichForrest]

How do I stop it doing it by itself, can I disable it?
It's been doing it for a while then it will stop for a few weeks and start up again.
The cd re-write doesn't work either as I tried to put some stuff onto a disc the other week but it says to insert a disc when there's already one in it.
The re-write and having no disc I'm not too worried about, it's just that while it's thinking about what it is doing it freezes the system for 30 seconds or so, which is bloody annoying if your in the middle of doing something and keep having to wait.

Rich.

[Valiant]

Jusy replace the CDRW, a new one is as little as a tenner. Otherwise go into hardware manager and disable the drive by right clicking.

[RichForrest]

Thanks, I've disabled it and will see if that stops the problem.

[Valiant]

It shouldn't be getting power now, so even if you press the button it won't open

[RichForrest]

It shouldn't be getting power now, so even if you press the button it won't open

It shows as disabled in the device manager, but will still open when I push the button.
Seems to have stopped the freezing problem though.
Will see if it lasts.

[Valiant]

I guess it's a motherboard based difference.

[TimO]

I would imagine that on most boards the drive would be powered on when the power supply was active.  Disabling the drive in device manager just stops the device driver, which could conceivably remove power from the actual physical device, although it would seem an unnecessary expense in the design of the motherboard to do that on most occasions.  It ought however, as you said, stop any possible weird software interactions.  It does sound like odd behaviour, it's probably just very dirty, or the laser's died.  If you've got some compressed air, that may clean the drive enough to make it reliable again, or as said already, replacement optical drives are dead cheap these days.  If you were near South Ken I could probably give you one, I've got a pile of old CD/DVD drives from when I replaced them all with CD/DVD-Writers in a load of our old PCs.

[fred the great]

I had a similar problem on a Compaq Notebook and had to buy a new CD Drive. The HP Service Centre supplied and fitted it for me.