[wellylug] Warning: Mandrake 9.2 and LG CD-ROM Drives

[Wood Brent]

--- Eugene Van Wyk <Eugene.VanWyk at 4rf.com> wrote:
> I have had an old 4 speed CDROM that did weird things when I tried to
> install an earlier version of Redhat.  Foolishly I tried a few times and
> the drive died.  The brand was Sanyo.
> 
> I have tried to run Lindows (the APC magazine version) on 2 different
> machines, without success.  However the second machine has an old 36
> speed CDROM, which made some very strange noises when starting from the
> Lindows CD.  It sounds as though something is rammed against its stop -
> the lens assembly against limits perhaps?  Brand is "Noname special",
> but sold by the same crowd that distributes Mustek stuff. 

You may be able to track down manufacturer etc from model numbers or FCC
numbers, if you have either. If they were sold by Comworth (Mustek importer)
they may also be able to help, tho personally I've found their tech support
limited.

Given the speed of the drives you've mentioned, I suggest both date from the
days of 640Mb being all that was written to a CD, & possibly also predating
CDRW disks. I've had problems with drives up to about 12x with some CDRW dyes.
Generally the most reliable CDRW disks with older CDROM drives seemed to be
Verbatim's blue CDRW disks, but your mileage may vary.

Sqeezing more than 640Mb on a disk can also cause problems for older drives. In
my experience this can cause a variety of error messages, & occasionally data
corruption (mis-read data).


> Any ideas on what would cause this, and is it similar to what is
> happening on LG drives?

The strange thing (to me), about the LG issue, is how a read can physically
damage a CDROM. Normally the drive can only do what the firmware lets it, &
having firware with built in self destruct capability is not normal practice
:-)

If your drives are simply having read problems during install, rather than
being physically damaged, I think it likely that it is a different problem.


Cheers
  
  Brent Wood