i had a dell poweredge a while back, and it had the cdrom drive hooked
to a third hard drive port, which i would expect the firmware update program
to not be able to see. if that is true, putting the cdrom drive on the primary
or secondary port may let it update the firmware.

Thanks for the idea!! I will try that.

No offence but Dell is cheap... well cheap components that you pay a fourtune for. Dell is a name you pay for, they know it too. This is why Dell doesn't place higher end components in their higher end equipement. Their idea is to church up the outside and put inside what will get you by, this is ofcourse minus processor. I have seen their upper end gaming and multimedia machines using system ram for video. Now that is cheap.

Hell the LG cdrom drives for them are literally a couple of dollars to purchase. Max cost is still in single digits for them. I can get LG cdroms from a PC builder I know for at his cost like 10 bucks. He won't even touch them because you do get what you pay for.

He as do I like LG's other products though. I have an LG CD/RW 8400b which is a 40x12x40, actually bought it from him. I love it, never had an issue with it. Works like a dream on the system it is in on both the on board IDE channels and the IDE channels on an add on PCI IDE card in the system. There is another burner in the system as well, it is a Digital Pacific CDWRITER IDE5224 a 52x24x52 and it was supposed to replace the LG. I ended up at this point avoid it like the plauge.

To some of you out here I bet you are wondering why and if you don't care I am going to say why anyways...lol

The reason is the LG has been more reliable with less buffer underruns and errors. It actually burns a disk quicker then the Pacific Digital, this do to that snazzy max burn speed being recorded at a maximum burst not the max constant spin of the drive. The most I have seen for constant burning speed on the Pacific Digital no word of a lie, and this is scary is 24x but the LG at constant spin loves 35x. I have tried to see if I can get the Pacific Digital to burn faster but no luck tweaking settings etc. This is under a dual boot environment in two OS's, in the BIOS, so on and so forth. It is the drive itself I've come to the conclusion.

From looking out here and from my own experience if you stay away from cheap LG PC products you will get a great peice of hardware.

Did you read what RAB22 posted? Do you know what ATAPI standards are? Do you know that the subject is about Goldstar CD players that are not ATAPI standard? Do you Know that DELL puts these cheep non-standard cd players into the computers they build?

I do not care about your company and the fully-loaded DELL powerEdge servers. Take a look inside of them and tell me where the parts came from and can they be used in another brand server.

Now you would like a useful, constructive and non-presumptuous tip or comment on this subject?
You have two choices at this point:
One, you can down load the fix from Goldstar and see if it works with Mandrake 9.2 or
Two, if one did not work, than your CD is dead, go buy a new one!

And please do not come back to tell us about the sweet deal you got on a new Goldstar.

I totally agree with you!

You mean I could have saved my CD-ROM if I'd found this thread? Oh well. After killing my LG CD-ROM upgrading from Mandrake 9.1 to 9.2, i just bought and installed a new drive. That's okay, I guess (just don't tell my wife)...this unit is twice as fast.

when you say CD-ROM, do you mean ONLY CD-ROMS? i installed using LG DVD-ROM and no problems

Well don't expect any help then.

Didn't have to. I had the same problem. A fix from LG site took care of it. It wasn't Mandrake's fault.

I'm very happy to hear that. But I'm still glad I replaced my CD-ROM. Thanks for the info.

CD drive *burnout* in any case where Mandrake 9.2 was installed without a CD drive failure -- I guess that drive is not Mandrake 9.2 burnt and all is well!

Grrrr i feel very angry....

I wanted to install the mandrake 9.2 at work... (they only work on win2k at this moment... ) It tooks me lot of time to make them accept that i will format one of their server to install the mandrake (IBM Netfinity 5100).

Its the second CDROM drive i destroy... now i know why !!

Are thoses CDROM Drives really destroyed or is there something to do to make them work again ??


THXXX

flash update can fix. skim back in the thread.

i think mandrake should release several new versions, all a week apart, so
that 9.2 looks like a really old version to people trying to decide what to get.

that way they could be at version 10.6 in no time, and 9.2 would look like
ancient history.

Still have the same problem...

1/ i boot on MS-DOS 6.0
2/ i change jumper settings
3/ i press the eject button
4/ release the eject button
5/ try to flash the firmware
..... the firmware update failed : it doesnt found my cdrom drive...

Someone else already had this problem ?

I see that you have very constructive posts in this thread Please, in the future, if you feel the necessity to give replies as you have above, attach something actual beneficial to the thread, if nothing else, a "good luck Mandrake users" would have sufficed. It at least gives the appearance that you actually have something to contribute to the thread, even though you really don't

Thank You.