Technical support responds that the pre-boot diag will fail if media is in the drive. The fact that nobody else seems to be experiencing the problem with hanging I/O makes me hopeful that some hardware replacement will solve it.
I've been trying to troubleshoot an issue with the optical drive in my (two-month-old) Vostro 5890, and I have a question: Should the drive be failing the BIOS diagnostic (in other words, the Diagnostics tab from the BIOS's One-time Boot Menu) if media is in the drive? (If the drive is empty, it passes; replacing the drive with a new one or moving it to another SATA port has no effect.) If you have a late-model system (10th generation Intel CPU), does yours fail similarly? [IMAGE] Thanks!
Vostro 5890 optical drive issue