hald-addon-storage CPU usage

[Strat]

I noticed after I installed my graphics card driver that my system would begin to get slow and jerky a few minutes after startup. After typing "top" in the Konsole, I found that hald-addon-storage was eating up my CPU. It consumes over 50%. My entire system begins pausing every few seconds.

I can stop the problem by opening and closing my bottom CD tray. However, it is very annoying to have to do that every time I reboot my computer.

I originally thought this problem had to do with my graphics card and started a thread in the Graphics Cards forum. Here's the link:

http://forums.pcbsd.org/viewtopic.php?t=7084

I did some searching on google but was unable to find anyone else with this problem. Is there any way to fix this? Thanks in advance.

[Apatewna]

Is there anything you can tell us about the "bottom CD"?

[Strat]

No, only that through trial and error I discovered that opening and closing THAT tray fixes the problem. Originally I was opening and closing both of them, but that got annoying, so I narrowed it down to the bottom one. I think both drives are actually identical otherwise.

Something else that is strange is that when I put a CD in the bottom tray, it shows up twice on my desktop. It thinks that there are two discs. The top drive does not do this.

[Apatewna]

You still haven't said anything about what brand the "bottom CD" is.
Also It would be interesting to hear how these "CDs" are connected to the motherboard (master/slave on first/second IDE channel, possibly RAID controller).

Can you show us the contents of /etc/fstab ?

"hald-addon-storage" does what it says. HAL has already detected a new device and attempts to give it a node ID so that it is usable in the internal hardware database.

I could start a whine about HAL on FreeBSD. But, I've had "hald-addon-storage" bork on me when I pluged a 12-to-1 smart card reader in a recent *linux* distro. And I couldn't kill the process using any way I tried, so a reboot made the problem go away. I had no slowdown however, just an annoying hanged process and a PC I couldn't at the time reboot due to a heavy download.

Expecting more info :)

[Strat]

/etc/fstab says:

# Device Mountpoint FStype Options Dump Pass#
/dev/ad0s2b none swap sw 0 0
/dev/ad0s2a / ufs rw 1 1

I have no idea what brand the disc drives are. How would I find that information (short of taking it apart)? The computer is a Dell Dimension 8300.