Bug 15335

Created attachment 15643 [details]
lshal output with working disc

Here is the output of lshal with an HP DVD+R disc in the drive

Created attachment 15644 [details]
lshal output with another working disc

lshal output with an LG CD-R disc in the drive

Created attachment 15645 [details]
lshal output with yet another working disc

output of lshal with a WinData DVD-R in the drive

Created attachment 15646 [details]
lshal output with no disc

This time, with no disc inserted into the drive

Created attachment 15647 [details]
lshal output with problematic disc

And finally, the lshal output with the Philips DVD-R disc that HAL does not 'see'.

The diff between this and attachment #15646 [details] is interesting; with no disc inserted, storage.removable.media_availble = false; with the Philips DVD-R disc inserted, it is true -- but there is no Volume device in the device list.

I've got a similar problem. It started happening very recently (today?). I'm also using Debian, unstable amd64, with hal 0.5.13-3. In my case it's recorded CDRs that aren't recognised. I've tried a couple of different brands, multi-session and single-session, none of them are recognised. I can still mount them with pmount, but at one point even that stopped working, pmount just kept hanging for ages while the drive LED flashed, but a reboot cured that. Even when mounted the volume doesn't appear as far as hal is concerned. I've tried a recorded DVD-R, a commercial data CD and a blank CDR, they've all appeared OK.

Two details in common with Sam Morris' problem are that I'm not experiencing this problem in Windows and storage.removable.media_available = true but there's no corresponding volume udi.

It's late now, but if a developer shows interest in investigating further I can try swapping in a different drive and/or trying the same hardware with LinuxMint on a USB stick.

Created attachment 29821 [details]
lshal output with a CDR present

I have now tested Mint 7 x86 (with hal 0.5.12~rc1+git20090403) on the same PC and it works correctly with that version.

I had the same problem with some DVD-R and DVD-RW, hal hangs while trying to mount the disk but if i kill hald and try to mount the disc manually it works without problems. While trying to debug the problem i found that calling 
"blkid -p -u raid /dev/sr0" blocks the dvd-drive as the same as hal does. Note that "blkid -p -u filesystem,crypto,other /dev/sr0" or "blkid -p -u noraid /dev/sr0" dont hang and return the detected filesystem. I made a patch that filter out the raid detection on disk volumes so hal can detect the filesystem and mount the disk.

Created attachment 30336 [details] [review]
hald optical disk detection patch

commited fix to my git, it gets merged later into upstream git:

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~dkukawka/hal/commit/?id=a20a7d126db0986c4113fa464fde60d34d91abe6

commit a20a7d126db0986c4113fa464fde60d34d91abe6
Author: César García <cesarg9@gmail.com>
Date:   Fri Sep 10 15:20:31 2010 +0200

    fix probing of optical disc volumes by ignoring raid

    Fixed probing of optical disc volumes by ignoring raid.

    Calling "blkid -p -u raid /dev/sr0" blocks the dvd-drive as the
    same as hal does. Note that "blkid -p -u filesystem,crypto,other
    /dev/sr0" or "blkid -p -u noraid /dev/sr0" don't hang and return
    the detected filesystem.

    This is a patch that filter out the raid detection on disk volumes
    so hal can detect the filesystem and mount the disk.

    fd.o#15335