CD-RW Will Not Eject Disks

I am having a problem with my CD-RW drive. The drive will accept a disk, it will read the disk, but then it will not eject it either by the eject button on the front of my tower or with any of the eject commands in My Computer or Easy CD Creator. The only way I can get the disk out of the drive is to shut the computer down and restart. Then the eject button will work. Dell has replaced two drives for me -- the second time they gave me a different brand. The problem remains. Incidentally, the eject button works just fine if there is no disk in the drive. Dell will not help me any more because they say it is obviously not a hardware problem and since I have partitioned my hard drive and upgraded to XP, they tell me that it is no longer there responsibility to help me. Have any of you have this, or a similar problem?

 

Hi Polly Held
Yes, I've had it happen to me many times. I end up having to open up Easy CD creator and ejecting through there.

Daizy

 

Thanks for replying. Tried that . . . didn't work.

 

Does this happen only after you've used a particular application, or all the time? What programs do you have running at startup?

 

Adaptec / Roxio does it again.

Do you have Direct CD installed?

It sounds like DirectCD is locking the drive for use as packet writing.

Does the drive lock when you use a Commercial (pressed not burned) audio CD?

Try removing direct CD - reboot then try Commercial disks - if that works, then try CDR. (not CDRW) - finally try CDRW that is not Formatted.

 

Well, while performing the diagnostics that Profgab101 suggested, I seem to have stumbled on the problem, and hence the solution. I was getting ready to uninstall DirectCD and, just for the heck of it, I ran the repair utility on installation CD. Now I seem to be able to eject disks at will. I must have had a corrupted file or something. I will keep an eye on it for further problems, but again, thanks to you all for your help. I seem to be getting answers to all my questions on this great BBS. I think in the future I'm going to just skip calling Dell, Microsoft, etc. They don't seem to want to help anyone if they can get away with it. And someone here always seems to be able to help. Thanks.

 

Congratulations Polly Held!
That's fabulous news! Thanks so much for taking the time to post back and let us know how you resolved your problem.

Daizy

 

This will also happen if you have direct cd installed but don't have the program loaded. Just thought I'd point this out thinking maybe you had it disabled. You can try it out and see what I'm talking about by putting a disk in that's formatted for directcd and then do a ctrl\alt\delete and end task on Directcd. Then try to eject the cd and you'll see that it won't open. To get it to open again look in your EZCD folder for a subfolder named DirectCD. In it you'll find a file named directcd.exe. Run that file and the icon will reappear in the system tray and you should be able to open the cd tray again. If for some reason you disable the program from time to time you can create a shortcut to directcd.exe and put it somewhere where it's easy to get at. Don't know if this has been your problem or not but thought I'd post this for others that may have this problem and are not aware of this.