One common source of problem which 8.1 exacerbates, through no fault of it's own, is DMA on CD-ROM drives.
Some CD-ROM/R/W drives do not co-exist well with hard drives on the same IDE chain. These CD-RW drives can accept DMA access mode. Systems in turn do not favor dissimilar speeds on the same IDE bus. It seems especially if older IDE cables are used (noise?). On one particular new computer I have, CD access will hang up the system under Winblows or Linux if the CD drive and the hard drive on the same IDE channel have DMA enabled at the fastest speeds each support. LM8.1 seems to enable it by default. By turning off DMA on either the hard drive or CD ROM everything works... I can manually turn on DMA after the system starts, but I have to be careful with "marginal" CD's which will hang the computer during CD read requests... |I burnt CDs with those ISO Images downloaded from different ftp sites, |disregarding whether md5sum matching or un-matching | |1) Burning at 2X speed on 650 MB CD can't solve the problem |2) Burning at 8X speed on 700 MB CD as recommended by Charles |Charles A |Edwards also can't solve the problem. | | |However my discovery is quite interesting. | |CDs burnt with above methods can be used for installation (even md5sum |un-matching). All of them went through without problem. After |installation completed Mandrake-Linux 8.1 started properly but |the mouse |died. At time of installation it was alive. | Since the other techniques failed to create "compatible" CD's, it could well be that your media & writer do not handle high speed writes very well. As I've mentioned, we only perform 2x writes for CD's which are going out for mass production in my firm. This is to assure no problematic reads on the duplication machines. When we go beyond 4x we will get failed batches, which is not good. Simply because you have a 12x recorder, does it mean that you should record at this speed... |It was a A4 Tech 3 button-wheel PS/2 mouse. The installing program |selected PS/2 standard mouse automatically and I was not allowed to |change. If changed the monitor screen started to blink and I |could not |change it back to PS/2 standard mouse. Then the PC will re-start |automatically. | |After Mandrake-Linux 8.1 started, in KDE I brought up |HardDrake window and |found the mouse there under HardDrake List. | |At re-boot the PC hanged during kill process with following |warning pop-up | |............. |................. |Mainloop return consoleInit : no such device or address |INIT : no more left in this runlevel | This may well be another separate problem, no longer related to the CD-Burn... Try "resetting" the PNP/PCI info in the BIOS and set the BIOS to NON-PNP. Bring up LM8.1 in text mode (initlevel 3) and kill off KDM/GDM if it is running. Then run mouseconfig to re-configure the mouse in text mode. This normally cures mouse related system freezes. -JMS
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