CDROM in FC3T3: beginning to panic, fearing that cd will never work! blame hal or kernel?

[Paul Johnson]

I'm getting more and more frustrated with the inability to mount cdroms 
in my Dell Inspiron laptop. This was an intermittent problem in FC2, and 
now with FC3 the problem happens every time. I filed a bug report in the 
bugzilla, and it was assigned, but I didn't see any response  yet.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=137831

In the meanwhile, I have decided to ask here for user advice.

WHen I put in a disk, the cdrom device just grinds away and 
/var/log/messages shows this, repeated forever:

Nov  5 09:58:50 pols111 kernel: hdc: irq timeout: status=0xd0 { Busy }
Nov  5 09:58:50 pols111 kernel: hdc: irq timeout: 
error=0xd0LastFailedSense 0x0d
Nov  5 09:58:50 pols111 kernel: hdc: DMA disabled
Nov  5 09:58:50 pols111 kernel: hdc: ATAPI reset complete
Nov  5 09:59:09 pols111 kernel: hdc: irq timeout: status=0xd0 { Busy }
Nov  5 09:59:09 pols111 kernel: hdc: irq timeout: 
error=0xd0LastFailedSense 0x0d
Nov  5 09:59:09 pols111 kernel: hdc: ATAPI reset complete
Nov  5 09:59:15 pols111 su(pam_unix)[3293]: session closed for user root
Nov  5 09:59:28 pols111 kernel: hdc: irq timeout: status=0xd0 { Busy }
Nov  5 09:59:28 pols111 kernel: hdc: irq timeout: 
error=0xd0LastFailedSense 0x0d
Nov  5 09:59:28 pols111 kernel: hdc: ATAPI reset complete

The hardware and cd are fine, I can boot into WinXP and all is OK.

As I browse the web, I see that this cd problem has occurred to a 
variety of users, and one frequent recommendation is to disable 
"autorun" by removing Gnome magicdev or KDE Autostart. In FC3T3, there 
is not "magicdev" anymore, but rather it is absorbed into 
"gnome-volume-manager" and I am afraid I don't know how to disable it. 
Even a "killall magicdev" does not help before inserting a cd.

That's why I do not think the problem I see is an automount problem.  I 
have gone into gconf-editor and turned off all of the cdrom automounting 
options.  Even if I boot into runlevel 3--without gnome or kde--I still 
have the trouble when I insert a cdrom.

I am beginning to think this is a hal problem, since hal is the new 
element. Or maybe udev.

I've been using Linux a long time and I have never run into an 
insoluable problem, but this one is scaring me.

So, if you have any ideas, I will gladly try them out.