Linux Desktop Summit Re: [SGVLUG] Hello from San Diego

[Terry Hancock]

Dustin Laurence wrote:

>>surprised -- my current problems are with: an nVidia video card (closed 
>>source)
>>and problems with inexpensive IDE/ATAPI CD-ROM drives).
>>    
>>
>
>Everybody is having optical drive problems.  I guess it isn't just
>Matti. :-)
>  
>
Most of the time, they work fine, but with cdparanoia, I
get a really weird result -- the drive progressively gets
worse "jitter" (according to cdparanoia) until cdparanoia
just "train wrecks" on a particular track, and the drive
becomes unusable.

But if you then reboot the computer (I think even a soft
boot will do it), then it's back to normal, and the process
starts over again. I can usually get through about 3 CDs
before needing a reboot (but some CDs make it crash
faster).  The weird thing is that it is progressive -- once
it screws up, no CD will work until the reboot.

The failure mode is weird too -- cdparanoia records silence
for the rest of the broken track, and for the other tracks (but
the track lengths are correct).   I guess it knows how long
the track is supposed to be, but it doesn't actually get the
data (OTOH, neither does it realize the drive has failed).

My research so far suggests this may be a manifestation
of bad hdparms and/or accessing the drive as /dev/hdd instead
of using ide-scsi emulation and accessing it on the SCSI chain
(it's an IDE/ATAPI CD-ROM).  But I still haven't figured out
how to fix that.  Might even be a problem with using Linux 2.6
(which I am).

It's only a problem for ripping CDs, it seems to handle data
disks just fine.

I also have a DVD drive that writes DVD no one else can read.
Pretty irritating, since I was trying to use it to move data from
one computer to a standalone system.  Not sure what that's
all about.

Cheers,
Terry

-- 
Terry Hancock (hancock at AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com