Re: [PLUG] Re: Newbie's first question - CDWriter followup or foulup ?

[Fred K Ollinger <follinge@sas.upenn.edu>]

> Oops.  This morning the CD-R drive wouldn't mount, so I looked
> into the matter and discovered that during an intervening reboot
> the BIOS had switched back to "NONE" for the Primary Slave
> IDE drive.   So I changed it again to AUTO and got the BIOS to

Did you reboot the machine overnight? Not being wise here, but many of us
leave our machines on all the time.

If the bios "forgot" what mode it was in, I suggest sending it back as
it's a hw problem. I don't see the point in trying to get back hw to work
esp if you just bought it. Big waste of time, and if it works, it probably
won't work as long as non-faulty hw.

> Alas, Linux cannot reliably detect the CDROM drive, except when
> I place the PC mfgr's (Boot PC) CDROM setup disk in the drive and
> reboot.  It will then open the CDROM disk, and it will even

Not familiar w/ this cd. How does it work? Does it boot linux after you
put cd in? Is linux coming from cd or hd?

> open my own burner's CD-R disk, but the mount command fails
> and I cannot keep that icon on the bottom toolbar to work; it

What desktop (just curious).

> either gives a failure command or crashes altogether.  The last
> couple of reboots the BIOS settings have remained stable and
> autodetect the CDWriter, but Linux can no longer find the
> CDWriter, either when I right-click to find the mounted floppy

You probably said this, but is this ide?

> (which seems to work OK, except that the file manager no longer
> detects a file which I saved onto that floppy earlier today and
> which I could read with a W98 PC) or when I invoke Hardware

Did you try:

mount /mnt/floppy
ls /mnt/floppy

from cli? I'm starting to suspect a faulty gui. What program did you use
to view floppy from gui?

> Browser.  I'm getting the notion that there's a hardware
> interference of some sort or that the Linux installation of the
> CDROM drive has gotten corrupted.  Any help would be appreciated.

I have never had trouble using a cd-rom (or rw), ide, w/ linux. Ever. Even
if drive is mechanically completely hosed, I still get some output from
the danged thing.

I personally don't like autodetect in bios. I like to tell my machine what
to do, but this could just be nuttiness on my part. However, can you just
select cd-rom in bios? I'm guessing that this worked worse than autodetect
mode.

You can snoop in /proc to see what linux really thinks of all this.

For ide, so:

cd /proc/ide/

and look around. In the hdx dirs, you can find a wealth of data. Esp
interesting is the /proc/ide/hdc/drivers, yours may be different.

If you use scsi, you can get same thrill from:

cd /proc/scsi

Best stop here is

cat /proc/scsi/scsi

This will tell you if linux ever saw that recalcitrant cdrom drive.

Also, you can do the good old:

dmesg

and grep for cd and other things.

Please let us know back on the list what's up. There are more than a few
pluggers who want to get deep into hardware troubleshooting right away. :)

Thanks for posting.

Fred


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