This almost falls into the need help with linux category, but, we are
having trouble getting past the BIOS. Some time ago I received a bunch
of great suggestions from people on the list about cd burner success in
linux. It was generally believed that an ATAPI compliant drive would
work. I recently bought a bunch of these for a school, and we are
having the below mentioned trouble. Before I return them, I have sent
the following help request to Sony and Gigabyte. I am going to bounce
it through here as well in case any of you have run into this
perplexer. The band-aid approach of using a standard cdrom to install
the OS has worked on these machines, so the kids are using linux, but,
they need to have a drive that will boot.
I have purchased 10 of these SONY CRX195 drives for use in a system
based on the Gigabyte GA-7VKML motherboard. When these cdrw's are
connected to the motherboard on the primay or secondary channel as
either master or slave, the motherboard hangs for a long time while
posting. The ide light for the motherboard stays on, and the door of
the drive will not open or close. After a while the machine continues
to post, but if the drives have bootable media in them, the BIOS reads
the cdrw's as small hard drives and offers the cylinders, heads, etc,
info for the bootable media in the cdrw. Gigabyte has an AUTO
selection, a CD selection, and an OTHER selection in its BIOS for
choosing ide devices. I have tried each option. When I choose OTHER,
the BIOS reports that this is a non ATAPI device. Any suggestions? I
notice that on the back of the drive that there are 6 pins to the far
left that are not jumpered. I have found that regular cdroms boot just
fine. These have two of the six pins to the back left side of the drive
jumpered.
This has happened with all 9 drives. We did a build it yourself class,
so we have many different builders with the same result. It seems like
hardware problems, but, 9 instances of the same issues suggests idiocy
in the process.
thanks for any suggestion you may have
scott
