On 05/06/2012, at 5:07 PM, Colin Fee wrote:

On 5 June 2012 17:02, Brian May <brian@microcomaustralia.com.au> wrote:
On 5 June 2012 16:57, Trent W. Buck <trentbuck@gmail.com> wrote:
> If you mount/umount the CD manually, it should be locked only when
> mounted, and umounting will implicitly unlock it.

Sometimes this implicit unlock on umount doesn't always work. Not sure
why, it hasn't bothered me yet enough to investigate.

Colin, Try running the eject command from a text mode command line,
and see if that helps.
 

I have been, that's what's frustrating.  If the drive is empty then neither the button nor the eject command work (well most of the time, sometimes you "luck in" and it opens). Once you've got a disc in place all works as expected. 

I'm going to try "dev.cdrom.lock = 0" in sysctl.conf to see what that does.
 
That's interesting, as I've seen this happen in XBOX consoles, their was a slight mod that someone I knew did to fix this up something to do with the cogs not engaging with the motor to eject the tray unless there was some weight on it.  But since it is working when the OS is not up it doesn't sound like a hardware problem.

Regards
Jason