My laptop has an internal DVD card which from time to time will enter a period where it constantly is making sounds like its trying to read a DVD even when empty ( no DVD ) ... it works when needed though ... it will go days just fine then start this repeated DVD noise again
Is there a way to temporarily disable the DVD card ?
Ubuntu 16.04
Sure it is the DVD and not the HD? I had a similar problem and solved it through the advice in https://sites.google.com/site/easylinuxtipsproject/bugs#TOC-Some-laptops:-hard-disk-constantly-clicks-and-spins-up-and-down
Check first with:
sudo hdparm -B 254 /dev/sda
The sound should stop now. If so, this problem was caused by the firmware of your HD, doing too aggressive power management. Solving went through adapting the power management.
This is only a solution during the current session. To make it permanent you have to edit /etc/hdparm.conf. E.g. with gksu and leafpad
sudo apt-get install gksu leafpad
Then open hdparm.conf with leafpad:
gksudo leafpad /etc/hdparm.conf
and add the following text at the end:
/dev/sda {
apm = 254
apm_battery = 254
}
I think the interesting question is which program you run is regularly scanning the DVD. That's a desktop/file manager tendency that I don't have on any current systems. I did see that a couple of years ago running Gnome.
Is your drive empty when this happens? Come to think of it, I've never heard an empty disk drive spin up...
Previous section to blacklist a module is interesting, but you have problem of figuring out which module to disable and that it is not needed by other devices that you actually do use.
Unless you need to read DVD very often, I would disable that device in the BIOS. That is is the surest way to get this to really turn off. The second link that @George mentions above says the BIOS does not have that feature, which surprises me. On the systems we have that still have DVD, there is a SATA listing for each device with a button. Oh, well.
If you go down the "disable a module" route, you can find out which modules are loaded by running "sudo /sbin/lsmod". You can unload a module from the command line to test if it really does prevent the disk drive from running still. Syntax is "sudo /sbin/modprobe -r module_name_here". If that does work, then create blacklist entry like others suggest.
But you need to be super cautious because if you disable something needed by your system, then, well, your system will not start. If you notice in the link mentioned on the comment about your question, it is about disabling user access to mount inserted media. It does not necessarily disable the device. Sorry to be so vague, but I think this is dangerous.
echo "blacklist sr_mod" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-sr_mod.conf