[PLUG] Persistent problems w. preinstalled RH 7.2 Linux

[George Langford <amenex@amenex.com>]

Hello fellow PLUGgers !

Here's my current (shorter) list of brick walls:

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.

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.

It's beginning to look as though the "best" way of dealing with
my W98 box's inability to burn a CD is to network it with the
Linux box and then to transfer (via ftp, tar or samba) the 
resulting monster (50 to 150 MB) files to the Linux box for 
archiving on the Linux box's CD-R/W drive; and then "reset" the 
Linux box; and then check the resulting CD-R disk with the W98 
box's word processor.  

   [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]

I found the following explanation for setting up the cross-
platform network:

	http://www.mandrakeuser.org/docs/connect/cmlan.html

which seems to make some sense.

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.

The Mandrake & CodeWeavers folks handled my Internet orders
very professionally, by the way.

Thanks to all for your continuing good humor and helpful
suggestions.

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

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