CD eject won't work: "unable to eject, last error: Invalid argument"

[Gerhard Magnus]

> | Colin Brace wrote:
> |
> |> Every so often Fedora stops letting me eject CDs:
> |>
> |> $ eject /dev/cdrom $ eject: unable to eject, last error: Invalid
> |> argument
> |>
> |> Why does this happen? I've seen both on my desktop as well as my
> |> laptop, and I saw it under FC3 and well as FC4. Nothing seems to
> |> solve it except straightening out a paperclip and ejecting the
> |> disk manually and rebooting. As far as HCI design goes, it is a
> |> worthless error message.
> |>
> |
> | I posted this a couple of days ago but no response. Doesn't
> | *anyone* have any idea what is going on? I keep getting it on a
> | random basis with both my CD and DVD drives. lsof doesn't reveal
> | any open files. What could it be? It is driving me nuts.
> |
> | TIA
> |
> try a tail -f /var/log/syslog, eventually there you get further info.
> 
> there are the two common reasons why those things happen:
> 
> 1. your cd drive is broken
> 2. the cd youre trying to use has an error
> 
> id bet for first one...
> 
> greetings
> oliver

Hello all,

	I'm still running FC3 and get this problem ejecting CDs periodically.
I don't have a clue how it happens but here's a hack around it:

fuser /dev/hdc         identifies processes using the device; then
kill -9 x              where x is the process ID

At least it's better than rebooting!

Jerry