DVD-ROM/CD-ROM Drives on Headless Systems (BugID 4365497)

Power management of interactive devices such as removable media is linked with power management of your monitor and the graphics card that drives your monitor. If your screen is active, devices such as the CD-ROM drive and floppy disk are kept at full-power mode. This means that if you are running a system without a monitor, these devices may go into low-power mode. If you want to restore power to the CD or floppy, simply type volcheck to cause the OS to get the latest status from each removable device.

Alternatively, you can disable power management on your system by using the dtpower GUI. Then the devices are not put into low-power mode even when on a headless system, but run at full power all the time. This is not a bug, but is the intended behavior.