I've read through the CDROM howto, burt there's no mention of a problem
like I had recently.
A friend and I put together a PC for a friend of ours, from spare
parts - *except* for the CDROM, which is a new 48x unit. It's a 1996
motherboard I'd say, judging by the BIOS date. It's a 150MHz Pentium.
We installed Linux too because our friend has heard us discuss it, and
is curious. But he needs Windows so he can run DragonDictate (RSI type
problem).
Anyway...
Weird problem with the CDROM, but *only* under Linux. (Under Win95 it
works fine and reliably.) Under Linux (RH 7.0) it sometimes can't see
the drive at all - the complaint mentions something like cdrom_irq.
Sometimes it says "the CDROM appears confused". Sometimes it only
reads partial data from the CD (e.g. an ls on /mnt/cdrom listed 3
directories; after a power-cycle reboot it saw all 12 or so that were
really there). Sometimes it refuses to mount. (The CD chosen is
irrelevant, BTW.)
It seems to be related to how much load we put on it - e.g. copying off
the large StarOffice 5.2 installation binary seemed to work fine, but
when we ran it it started complaining of missing files. A power cycle
followed by an install straight from the CD however worked fine - just
took longer.
A full power cycle seems to snap the drive out of its bozo state.
Thinking about it now, it also seemed like it got confused after you
ejected the CD and put a CD in next (with umount and mount in between,
of course!). I.e. you get a chance to work with one CD, and have to do
a hard reboot before using another (or the same one).
The CDROM is a new no-name ATAPI drive - I bought it specially for the
machine. Plus it works fine under Windows. :-(
Does Linux have some aggressive optimisations for use of IDE CDROM
drives? Maybe the older motherboard isn't up to this? The CD is much
newer than the machine... Maybe there's an assumption in the driver
that new CD == new motherboard?
Does anyone know of any relevant lore? This is running with the stock
RH 7.0 kernel -
luke
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