Hi,

I have two new CD burners that just blink the power lights occasionally,
and this completely hangs my Scientific Linux 5.4 booting.

When I try with another CD burner with DVD combo, this one has never shown
such mischievous behavior.

I am beginning to think of possible faulty hardware on the CD burners, but
how can I be sure?

Thanks.

In the first instance I would recheck the cabling connections to the drives, and also try swapping out the cables in case the error is with them rather than the drives themselves. However, you don't really describe in what way the drives affect the booting of LINUX? Does it not work at all, or is there just an additional delay introduced? You may also find that lowering the boot priority of the CD drives in your computer's BIOS might eliminate the problem.

Hi

A couple of quick suggestions.

I'm assuming here that the burner is an EIDE device and not a SATA device (if that is not the case then post back and let me know).

Ensure that the burner is correctly configured as Master on the secondary EIDE channel, and that any other device on that channel is configured as a slave (ie. no conflicts).

Ensure that you are using a high density (80 conductor) EIDE cable to connect the drive to the motherboard, and that all cables are correctly and securely inserted (Note that the cables are polarized and MUST be inserted in the correct direction).

Enter the system BIOS on system start up and ensure that all the devices on both EIDE channels are correctly identified. If not then refer to the comments above. In particular ensure that the burner is configured as the Master device on the Secondary EIDE channel, and that the HDD is configured as the Master on the primary EIDE channel.

As a test:

Temporarily make the burner the primary boot device in the BIOS, and boot the system with a live distribution (such as Knoppix), and see if the system is able to boot successfully. This step is to check if the booting problem is specific to "Scientific Linux 5.4"

If it fails to boot then note down the messages that you see on the screen and post them back into this thread.

Disconnect all devices from the EIDE channels, except the burner (leaving it as the Master device on the secondary EIDE channel), and again boot the system with the live Distro.
This step is to eliminate any possible conflicts between the EIDE devices, and allow for their identification.

If it fails to boot then note down the messages that you see on the screen and post them back into this thread.

Will be interested to hear the results of your investigations.

Chris