Fred K Ollinger on Wed, 22 May 2002 11:59:38 -0400


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Re: [PLUG] Persistent problems w. preinstalled RH 7.2 Linux


> 1.  When I burn a CD, no matter how, the computer hangs up so
>     completely that all I can do is hit the reset button. Yet,
>     the CD-R disk is perfectly readable (even with long file
>     names) on both a W98 box and the Linux box. And it mounts
>     automatically after the reset Linux box has booted up again.
>     It seems hardly likely that any interrupt conflict could
>     become destructive _after_ the burn is over ... and the
>     amount of space taken up on the CD-R disk is about right;
>     it's not truncated.  I still suspect those CD-R disks, though.

I have had quite a few cds not burn at all. The operation quit immediately
and told me that the cd was unburnable (paraphrase).

I got a fresh cd and it worked great. The cds are from staples. They were
very inexpensive. I wonder if it would have been more economical to buy
more expensive media and save time.

> 2.  When I reboot, the only way I can mount my CD-R/W drive is
>     to leave the boot floppy in its drive.  Then, all's well.
>     In the meantime, I'm being very nice indeed to that floppy
>     disk.  Mebbe my new Mandrake-Linux distribution can do it
>     better than the preinstalled RedHat 7.2 is managing.

Do this now, w/ floppy in drive under linux:

dd if=/dev/fd0 of=boot.fl

This will create a disk image of the floppy disk.

Now put fresh floppy in and do:

dd if=boot.fl of=/dev/fd0

Watch what you type. If you specify a raw partition, you could hose it. I
have heard the Linus himself did this before.

>    [MS has a free Word 97 viewer that lets non-Word-97 users
>     view or copy (but not edit) Word 97 files; and this should
>     be nice to place on those CD-R's along with the Word 97
>     documents -
>     http://office.microsoft.com/downloads/2000/wd97vwr32.aspx]

Or you could convert to pdf, which would give you the same thing, but it
would support more OSes.

> I'm currently trying to fix the CD-burner's problem by fitting
> an external IDE drive (via USB) to the Linux box to which I can
> transfer the file(s) to be archived on the CD-R/W drive with
> the "mkisofs -r -J -T -o cd.iso /.../.../Word97.doc" command,
> I hope with the full path to the location of the /.../.../cd.iso
> file.  This might just solve the CD-burn-freeze problem we've
> been discussing.

Why not get a hub? Do both machines have ethernet cards? You could use
samba to solve this. Heck, you could use samba to save the files directly
onto a drive mapped to linux box so there is no hassle w/ copying, etc.

There is a way to turn a floppy into a boot floppy using mkisofs. If you
want to do that, I can help you w/ the syntax. I usually try to turn boot
floppies into cds:

http://www.shockley.net/obsd-bootcd.asp

Yes, it's an openbsd page, but the syntax is the same for mkisofs. This is
the best document I've ever read on how to get the syntax right for this
tricky feature. (I'm usually in the wrong dir, or I specify the wrong path
to boot floppy).

I usually make book cdrws, they boot in my cdrw drive and the OSes get
stale anyway, so I can wipe it and replace w/ more recent versions.

Fred


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