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

Eugene Van Wyk Eugene.VanWyk at 4rf.com
Tue Oct 28 09:15:39 NZDT 2003


Hi Brent

The old 4 speed I talked about died completely.  The 32 speed drive with
Lindows may be a read issue, although it will be the first time I have
any issues with that drive, and I've put many CDR's through it.  In
fact, it replaced a 52X drive that regularly failed to read CDR's. 

Eugene van Wyk
Test Development Engineer
4RF Communications
26 Glover str
Ngaraunga
Wellington
New  Zealand


-----Original Message-----
From: Wood Brent [mailto:pcreso at pcreso.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, 28 October 2003 8:01 a.m.
To: wellylug at lists.naos.co.nz
Subject: RE: [wellylug] Warning: Mandrake 9.2 and LG CD-ROM Drives


--- 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




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