CD drive quick start/stop when user is idle.

[GottaBuild]

I have noticed that at times, even when I am idle, the CD drive which has the Knoppix CD performs a series of quick start-stops, making a sort of clucking sound, with about 2 to 3 clucks per second. This is nothing like the sound of normal CD operation which starts with a constant and building whirring sound, etc. My clucking sound is almost like the sound of some hard drive operation, only louder of course. (I have knoppix on a plain old CD-R which I burned from an iso download). These clucking sounds happen during every session, but not very frequently, and at intervals whose logic escapes me. Am I hearing the sound of unsuccessful write attempts?

[ckamin]

GottaBuild:

It may be absolutely normal. Sometimes the drive may do a seek/read routine similar to what a hard drive does when it reads files from disk. You might try using the "knoppix dma" cheatcode on startup to see if it smooths things out a bit. If you watch your hard drive activity during the operation under an Installed OS, it appears to be similar in nature to the optical drive activity with a Live disk. The CD Rom might appear to work differently when reading audio or larger files under Windows.