Hello everyone,

I have been trying to breath some new life into an old P4 desktop that was an ex-security camera control box from my company. They were just going to throw it away, so I took it home and put the latest Ubuntu (10.10) on it. It has three hard drives, each 500GB, with one Primary and two secondary. They are all IDE. When I tried to run a live CD in the Sony DVD drive, it would get to a start screen, then fail with "Cannot find media with a kernel." Which of course meant that the CD drive with the live CD could not be read. This same result happened with every live CD I tried EXCEPT Ubuntu 9.04, which I went ahead and installed, then upgraded online all the way to Lucid. Everything has been working fine, quick and snappy.

However, I tried to put a DVD in the drive and discovered it was not recognized as even existing. wodim -scanbus command yielded this:

Code:

wodim: No such file or directory.
Cannot open SCSI driver!
For possible targets try 'wodim --devices' or 'wodim -scanbus'.
For possible transport specifiers try 'wodim dev=help'.
For IDE/ATAPI devices configuration, see the file README.ATAPI.setup from
the wodim documentation

Clicking on the icon in the Computer location of the desktop resulted in the error in the title of this thread.

So, I checked to make sure the BIOS recognized it. It did, and it is connected as an IDE secondary slave. I tried moving the jumpers around to make it a master or cable select, and unless it is connected as a slave, the BIOS won't recognize it. There is no file /dev/cdrom, but I manually added an entry into fstab. There is nothing found in dmesg. There is no doubt that it works because I installed the operating system from a live dvfd.

Can anyone offer an clue what this might be? I know the device is function as it installed Jaunty fine and does run other live cd's to the point of selecting run. This must be the same issue that does not allow the other live cd's to find the kernel.

Thanks in advance for any thoughts or help

Bob

Old systems stink when you put in two drives and may get worse when you try a dvd or other newer drive for booting. The bios was not made to do that and I have had to fool with stuff like that before. Try to remove the dvd or put it on the ide only as master with no other cd/dvd on the system.

Linux distros have changed the way it accesses IDE too. Most call it sdx but really it is not a scsi drive, the os simply is "fooled" or uses it like a scsi.


Try ultimate boot cd too and run some tests.

Thanks, Jefro for your reply. I seemed to have resolved it, but I am not sure how I did it. I switched the ribbon cables around so that the middle connector when to the board and the end went to dvd drive (it was originally the other way around.) There was, of course, no entry in fstab or a cdrom folder in /media, so I created those and on the next reboot it worked as normal. That is all I did, and after switching the ribbon cable around, dmesg discovered it on the next boot. To tell you the truth, I do not know why which part of the cable is connect to what makes any difference, but it obviously did.

I would normally agree with you about older systems, but this one is a P4 3.00ghz with a 128mb ATI card and I felt like it could still have some life rather than just throwing it away. P4's were always workhorses for me. My company used this computer to control 8 security cameras, so it ran 24/7 for five years. I didn't expect much when I got home, but to my surprise everything is in good shape and Ubuntu 10.10 runs very fast on it.

I will test it a few more days, then try to find a family who may be able to use it and can't afford a new one.

Thanks for your help

Bob

Normally the middle connector should be connected to slave drive, the nearer end to master drive and the further end to motherboard. Cable select option not always work as expected, so better is setting jumpers manually, and using 80 pins cable. The other way of connecting may lead to undetectable drives or bad performance. If your drive work as you described, it can be possible that cable is damaged. Better will be buying new cable.

Sorry, when I read older p4 I was thinking like a 700 to 1.5 or so processor.