Whirring DVDRom Drive at Boot

Magnakai · 28 May 2016

hi,

i have one old laptop with a dvdrom drive as its mounted bay device. i have disabled the drive in device manager and also disabled 'mounted bay device' at bios, but on every boot, the pc still reads it once and i hear this 2-3 second whirring from the empty drive. apart from this occurrence at boot, the drive does appear disabled during normal operation.

is there anything i can do short of physically disconnecting the cable to end this?

i don't want it to activate at all, at any time.

fireberd · 28 May 2016

That's just the BIOS checking devices (even if its disabled). If you don't want it at all, disconnect the power and data cables on the rear of the drive.

Digerati · 30 May 2016

Ummm, that's not the BIOS checking for hardware. Any time you first apply power to any optical drive, it spins up for a second or two. This is because they don't have on/off switches. Although the system uses that time to check for an inserted disk, the initial spinning is just the drive powering on. For that reason, you don't need to disconnect the data cable, you only need to disconnect power. This will prevent it from spinning up, and being detected too.

That said, since this is a notebook, the drive probably slides into sockets and does not use cables. So unless the drive keeps spinning, I would not worry about it.