[Techtalk] CD-ROM weirdness

[Marize Pommot-Maia]

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Patricia Fraser wrote:
| Hi Alvin,
|
| Thanks!
|
|
|>Last time any of my drives started showing this info, I had to open
|>the box and re-seat all of the cables. The cables can either "grow
|>barnacles" (using old vacuum tube parlance) or can vibrate loose
|>slightly (loading and unloading disks, thumping the box while
|>cleaning, etc).
|
|
| Will try it (tomorrow). But in the meantime, I've been messing about...
|
| Okay! Drive boots happily from the Mandrake CD. No problems. Drive
| *also* works fine if I drop back to a 2.4 kernel; drive *also* works
| fine if I drop back one step in the 2.6 kernels I've been mowing
| through with updates - 2.6.16 seems to be the last before this.
|
| Looking at the messages, I find this:
| Dec 12 11:06:52 andromeda modprobe: FATAL: Error running install command
| for scsi_hostadapter
|
| And I'm wondering whether there's something weird about the current
| iteration of the Mandrake version of the IDE-SCSI thing; it seems to
| bork utterly on a bad disk. One of the CDs is dodgy; but when I try it
| under a 2.4 kernel, it borks but the next (good) one is okay; when I
| try it under 2.6.16 the drive won't spin down and I have to press the
| Big Red Button; under 2.6.19 it fails a bit more gently, but won't read
| any disk thereafter.
|
| Cheers; any more input greatly welcome!
|

I was getting the same behavior in one drive this weekend.  Yesterday I
cleaned the laser head and it still wouldn't work.  So I opened the box
took the CD drive out and gave it a good compressed air treatment.
There were some "barnacles" both inside and around the cables.  Now it's
back working without complaining.

The box is running Debian testing/unstable with kernel 2.6.9 so I can't
comment on the behavior of Mandrake and kernel 2.6.x  However, another
machine was reporting it wasn't able to load a given network module when
the problem was the network card itself.  Replacing the card fixed the
problem then.

Good luck,
- --
- ------------------------------------------------------------------------
				Marize Pommot-Maia
				marize at pommot.net

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