[Techtalk] CD-ROM weirdness

[Patricia Fraser]

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!

-- 
Trish Fraser, Sunbury, Australia
Thu Dec 16 00:01:43 EST 2004
GNU/Linux 1997-2004 #283226 counter.li.org
andromeda up 0 hour(s), 24 min, 32 sec
kernel 2.6.3-19mdk
--