HELP: Slack 9.1 and Samsung CDR-3231

Matto4297 · 06-09-2004, 04:10 AM

I'm trying to install Slackware 9.1 on an old machine (PII 266, 64MB, 4GB) from the CD. I have a Samsung SCR-3231 32X CD-ROM drive.

The disk boots fine from the BIOS and i can login as root using the bare kernel and use fdisk to partition my hard drive, i can activate the swap partition but when it comes to the "choose source media" section, my CD-ROM drive is not found and therefore i can't continue the install.

I've tried using several different boot dsiks with support for old cd-rom drives but with no luck and googling for help brings up windows drivers only!

If anyone could help I'd be very appreciative

Thanks

Matt

Astro · 06-09-2004, 08:48 AM

I came across an old CDROM I had that was like this. Nothing you can really do, the support simply isn't there or the support for the drive is just bad. You can do one of a few things really; When it happened to me I just took the hard drive out of that computer and put it in another and installed, then transferred it back to the other computer. Another option is to use a different CDROM drive if you can get ahold of one.

Matto4297 · 06-09-2004, 09:10 AM

thanks for the help. I have another CD drive so i'll try that.. then i can work on trying to fix the problem.

It's pretty hard to work out how to get something working when you can't even install an OS!!!

Astro · 06-09-2004, 09:16 AM

I agree, thats one thing though I like about linux, I can install it on one drive in a fast computer so the install takes like 5 mins, then dump the drive off into another computer that doesnt have a net card/cdrom/whatever and have it not care what hardware it's on. If you were to do that with windows theres gonna be a good chance it wont work well if at all because of all the hardware changes it'd have to make.

Matto4297 · 06-09-2004, 09:18 AM

btw just out of interest. when you transferred your hdd back into the system with the old cd drive in it. dit the OS recognize it?

Slack 9.1 seems to recognize it on bootup as being /dev/hdb but it just won't mount in the installer!!

weird!

Matto4297 · 06-09-2004, 09:20 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Astro
I agree, thats one thing though I like about linux, I can install it on one drive in a fast computer so the install takes like 5 mins, then dump the drive off into another computer that doesnt have a net card/cdrom/whatever and have it not care what hardware it's on. If you were to do that with windows theres gonna be a good chance it wont work well if at all because of all the hardware changes it'd have to make.

yeah especially with winxp and it's weird registration system, if you change the hardware it stops working and tells you to buy a new copy!!

Astro · 06-09-2004, 08:50 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Matto4297
btw just out of interest. when you transferred your hdd back into the system with the old cd drive in it. dit the OS recognize it?

Slack 9.1 seems to recognize it on bootup as being /dev/hdb but it just won't mount in the installer!!

weird!

mmm to tell you the truth, after I transferred it back I never used the CDrom drive

...just ran it as a server with no monitor/keyboard/mouse.

Matto4297 · 06-12-2004, 07:38 AM

lol! sounds like a plan!!

Chant · 07-09-2004, 09:55 PM

I had to grin when I found this... earlier today I was wrestling with a Samsung SCR 3231 (rev 101) while installing Slackware 10.0. (Kernel 2.4.26). Exactly the same results, boots the CD nicely from the BIOS, and the kernel will recognise the drive either as IDE/ATAPI (as /dev/hdc, which is correct) or using the ide-scsi interface. Both look fine in /sys and dmesg, and both interfaces can produce activity from the drive... but neither will read a CD. This doesn't just apply to the slackware install, either. The behaviour is just the same with a fully installed kernel and a normal boot-up.

Strangely, I think I remember using the drive successfully with a Red Hat 9 kernel (2.4.20). On the other hand, I'm not too sure about that. I also think I remember having had trouble when I did the Red Hat install, so that if I ever saw the drive work under Linux it was after compiling a kernel locally.

I think we have to assume that there is some quirk of the SCR 3231 that makes it fail.

One possibility is this (from drivers/ide/ide-cd.c in the kernel source, added by Alan Cox in March 2003):

Quote:

/* the 3231 model does not support the SET_CD_SPEED command */
else if (!strcmp(drive->id->model, "SAMSUNG CD-ROM SCR-3231"))
cdi->mask |= CDC_SELECT_SPEED;

The drive is 32x, and the CD blank I used for the installation is only 16x. On the other hand, I did consider this when testing and tried several different CDs. I suppose I'd better dig out one that is guaranteed to work at 40x to make sure.

If this is the reason that the SCR-3231 is failing, then we have to ask how the BIOS is able to use the drive to boot the 16x CD... Is there perhaps a way to control the speed of the drive after all?

andrex · 07-12-2004, 10:24 AM

It seems that in newer kernels IDE DMA support is on by default and that causes problems with Samsung SCR-3231 CD-ROM drive.

Running
# hdparm -d0 /dev/hdc
before
# setup
worked for me and the Slackware 10 installer was able to find the source media.

Chant · 07-21-2004, 09:16 PM

Yes, Andrex, you've hit the nail on the head. Turning off DMA makes the drive work.