I have a PIII 550 MHz HP-Vectra VEi8 that has a NEC-NR 7900A CD-ROM CD-RW (acting as a Secondary Master with no device as Secondary Slave and one HDD as Primary Master). My Red Hat instalation is in a dual-boot system with Windows XP (with GRUB in the MBR). The system boots fine under both operating systems.

My problems arises when (in RH9) I insert a CD (with none previously mounted), the system freezes totally and that the CAPS Lock and Scroll Lock LED's on my keyboard blink. If a CD is left inside the CD-ROM before booting to RH9 there are times when there is no freezing and all is normal, and others when after the login, the system attempts to read the CD via CD Device Handler, but freezes with LEDs blinking. Ejecting the CD in RH9 doesn't freeze the system. Issuing either of these command:

mount -t iso9660 /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom
or
mount -t auto /dev/scd0 /mnt/cdrom

freezes the system. Issuing:

mount -t auto /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom
or
mount -t iso9660 /dev/scd0 /mnt/cdrom

seems to progress, stating: "mount: block device /dev/scd0 is write-protected, mounting read-only" or "mount: block device /dev/cdrom is write-protected, mounting read-only" (depending if using /dev/scd0 or cdrom) and opens the cdrom direcory, but freezes a moment after nonetheless. In one of these previous attempts, i was able to reboot (in terminal), and while Linux was shutting down, it showed a display with all the processor registers showing and the process tracker. I was able to recover the following:

[***process tracker dump***]
<0>Kernell Panic: Aiee, killing interrupt handler!
in interrupt handler - not syncing

and of course, the system froze with LEDs blinking.

I also tried Failsafe mode at the login, but the same thing happens.

There are no problems in Windows Xp.


Under Hardware Browser, my CD-ROM appears as: /dev/scd0
In /etc/fstab, the CD-ROM has the line:
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom udf,iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0

If anyone has any suggenstions on what this problem may be and/or how to fix it, it will be greatly appreciated.