CD drive goes Idle after brief use

I'm trying to use a Knoppix 3.9 Boot CD to rescue data off of a laptop hard drive (as suggested by a coworker) and it worked perfectly initially, could get into the hard drive and see everything... but after about five minutes of use, the CD drive would idle (flashing LED, no "spin"), which basically froze up my usage of Knoppix. Manually ejecting the CD and popping it back in would restart it for another few minutes and then I would get the idle problem again. Any idea of how to deal with this, or if it's the Knoppix I'm using that's the problem?

Also, anyone who's used it to rescue have any suggestions of the best way to get the data off? it's about 5 gigs of information.

Computer: Dell Inspiron 5100 (still under warranty), with external wireless
Rescue Problem: Registry damaged (trying to rescue data before System Recovery)

It certainly sounds like the CD. I would suspect a high speed burn had been done, assuming that you verified that the download was good with the md5 check. A disc burnt at a slow speed from a confirmed good download would likely resolve your issues. If you have 1 gig of RAM available you might also try the toram cheat code to get everything loaded into ram and then your CD can stop spinning all it wants and there will be no problem, but if it's a bad burn then toram may not help.

You were right! It was the CD. Even the toram didn't work, so I got a diff. version on a confirmed-working CD from my coworker and am transferring the files via Konqueror right now. I knew Linux was the fix to all my crap Windows problems. Thanks for your help! :lol: