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

[George Langford <amenex@amenex.com>]

Hello PLUG members !

Last night I stated with utmost confidence:

> Got a Linux-In-A-Box PC from a California vendor, configured 
> already, except that the CD-R/W drive wasn't connected to the 
> Primary Slave IDE port in the BIOS; it would read the Linux 
> distribution disk if I rebooted with the disk in place (but 
> not yet mounted), but it wouldn't read anything at all when 
> the PC was up & running.  And I could not mount it.  Fixed 
> that; Hardware Browser was especially helpful in discovering 
> what was wrong there.  Now at least I can _read_ CD-ROM's 
> (haven't tried to burn a CD-R yet).

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
recognize the CDWriter (Samsung SW212, marked "CDWriter 12832" on 
its cover) during bootup.  Then I heard an ominous "pop" during
loading of Linux.  That sounded like the deathly ejection of  
magic smoke which I have often heard during analog circuit board
development testing, but I didn't smell anything so I continued ...

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
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
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 
(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 
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 did look at the following results of a Google search on

       (+"hardware browser" +linux +cdrom) without the parentheses:

http://search-desc.ebay.com/search/search.dll?MfcISAPICommand=GetResult&SortProperty=MetaNewSort&query=%28standly%2Cstanely%29%2C%2D%28stanley%29&srchdesc=y&ht=1&itemtimedisp=1&combine=y&st=2
http://pluglist.mybutt.net/pipermail/plug-discuss/2001-November/018260.html
http://pluglist.mybutt.net/pipermail/plug-discuss/2001-November/018259.html


but none of then show whether the attempted fixes were
conclusive or effective.

Thanks for looking at this.

Best regards,
George Langford
amenex@amenex.com
http://www.amenex.com/
http://www.georgesbasement.com/

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