2025-12-15 - Replacing My Laptop Optical Drive
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A month or so ago, i noticed my terminal would randomly lock up in
the middle of typing. Other parts of the system were still
responsive. In fact, i could open a new xterm and use it just fine.
I felt alarmed and it took me a while to correlate my problem to
optical drive errors in the `dmesg` output. Why was the optical
drive being accessed at that time? I still don't know, but i'd guess
some indexer (tumblerd?) or volume manager was probing the drive and
got hung up.
It only happened once in a while, so i ignored it. The drive
continued to work fine. I actually like optical media. I wrote a
CD-RW only a couple of weeks ago.
A few days ago, the drive completely failed. It would no longer read
or write to any media. My USB optical drive worked fine using the
same media.
I have had many laptops fail over the years. It's a consequence of
my style of computing where i use exclusively hand-me-down hardware
left behind when family or friends upgrade theirs. My state has an
e-waste "recycling" program, which i use enthusiastically, because
i like the idea of keeping toxic materials out of the water supply.
But before i "recycle" a failed laptop, i will cannibalize the
memory, storage, etc, including the optical drive. So i have spare
parts!
This morning i swapped in a Panasonic DVD writer manufactured in
2013. It works great. The only issue is that i cannot re-use the
face plate from the failed drive because it's not detachable. So the
replacment drive has a silver face plate while the rest of the laptop
is black. It's like driving a repaired car with one door that's a
different color than the others. Functionality is fine, and the
cosmetic dissonance gives the car character. ;)
tags: bencollver,technical
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