Empty drive, repeated eject noise

Tried the reset without the battery and it is still making the noise, which by the way is the "wake up from sleep" according to the Apple recordings.

What is the underlying cause of this? Is the computer sending repeated signals to the drive to wake up?

Now it constantly does it while the computer is sleeping. As soon as the drive stops spinning, it wakes it up again and it starts to spin. I can't leave it in sleep without it completely draining the battery and am afraid that it will wear out the drive.

Exactly the same for me. Makes the eject noise when asleep with no disk in, or with a disk in repeatedly spins it up. Apart from the annoying noise, it means I have to keep switching the computer off rather than leaving it sleeping as the battery soon goes flat. Strangely my Expresscard Reader no longer works since installing Leopard.

I spoke with Apple today and they reckon it is a hardware problem and have recommended I get the drive changed.

Yep. Same problem. I've had mine for two years, and it makes this noise ONLY when shut, but it does it every 30 seconds endlessly.I've seen another discussion thread with multiple people complaining about this as well. I'll try the "fix".

yes, I've had to fix my keyboard twice, my DVD/CD drive once, and had my hard drive erased because the computer was so slow they thought it might be a software problem and wanted to ensure it wasn't hard drive. Ugh. Thank God for apple care. This is irritating.

Tried the "fix" listed above to no avail. I then tried putting a CD in the drive and then leaving it in while closed, which stopped the irritating sound. Now it just sounds like it's trying to read the cd endlessly. I don't know that its actually sleeping. ??

And...I still have tiger so I don't know if that's the culprit, or time, given my computer is now 1.5 years old.

Hi,

I was having this issue also. I tried everything on this forum, and then went to the Apple store Genius bar. Apple went so far as to replace the Superdrive, but sadly that did nothing to solve the problem. So I did some troubleshooting at home. We are using a Sprint Sierra Wireless Air Card 595U, which is basically a wireless antenna that plugs into the USB port. Duh! For some reason when this card is plugged in to the MacBook Pro the machine will not sleep. It must be getting signals of some kind even when the software claims it is disconnected ?? Anyway, that solved the mystery. Unplug the air card, the machine sleeps fine.