Is my cd burner fried?

geomatt · 02-20-2005, 02:09 PM

Hi all,
I am wondering if anyone out there in LQ land could help me out with a cdrw drive issue.

I am running slack 10.0 on an IBM thinkpad r40. It has a Matshita UJDA740 DVD/CDRW drive in the ultrabay. And I have had no problems burning cds in it until recently. A few days ago I was using k3b to burn an audio cd and it froze my system while in the midst of burning. (The first time I managed to ctl+alt+bksp out of X and then ctl+alt+del to shut down, the second time that didn't work and I had to powerdown because the system was completely frozen - something I hate to do to my poor hard disks.) So I tried doing the same thing from the CLI with cdrecord and about halfway through I found myself logged out and the cd drive still spinning. Next I tried burning just a couple of audio tracks (in stead of 15 in my original attempts)and the burns were successful in a way - completed without crashing the system. But the resulting cd's were nothing but noise - low frequency buzzing alternating with silence. So I reinstalled cdrecord, cdrdao, and k3b and now I can get music tracks distorted by the same intermittant, low-frequency buzzing noises. The same thing happened when I recorded at a lower speed. Are these the sounds of a dying drive? That would be a pain, since this laptop is only a year old and i expected it to last a little longer....

I will supply logs and such if anybody can tell me where to look for them - I am not so experienced with hardware diagnosis.

Thanks,

geomatt

foo_bar_foo · 02-20-2005, 10:45 PM

exactly the same thing happened to me
the slow speed music cds are wild at parties yes ?

anyway i switched to ide-scsi for the cd drive and it works perfectly
the ide-cd driver just sucks is the conclusion i came to

geomatt · 02-21-2005, 07:19 AM

Quote:

the slow speed music cds are wild at parties yes ?

Yes, indeed.

lsmod reveals that the drive is using the ide-scsi driver already.

Code:

Module                  Size  Used by
ipv6                  214244  - 
arc4                    1320  - 
ieee80211_crypt_wep     4712  - 
crc32                   3688  - 
intel_agp              18216  - 
ehci_hcd               24908  - 
usbcore                95844  - 
snd_intel8x0           28104  - 
snd_ac97_codec         60524  - 
snd_pcm                77128  - 
snd_timer              18892  - 
snd_page_alloc          8592  - 
snd_mpu401_uart         5384  - 
snd_rawmidi            16384  - 
snd                    38648  - 
soundcore               6272  - 
8250_pci               15912  - 
8250                   27424  - 
serial_core            17160  - 
ipw2100               146300  - 
firmware_class          6696  - 
ieee80211              13260  - 
ieee80211_crypt         4396  - 
eth1394                17168  - 
ohci1394               29452  - 
ieee1394               88920  - 
eepro100               25428  - 
mii                     3656  - 
joydev                  7616  - 
evdev                   6848  - 
ds                     14512  - 
yenta_socket           17480  - 
pcmcia_core            58248  - 
ide_scsi               12876  - 
agpgart                27016  - 
apm                    16980  -

Here is some more stuff I have found:

Code:

bash-2.05b# cdrecord dev=ATAPI -scanbus
scsidev: 'ATAPI'
devname:'ATAPI'
scsibus: -2 target: -2 lun: -2
Warning: Using ATA Packet interface.
Warning: The related libscg interface code is in pre alpha.
Warning: There may be fatal problems.
cdrecord: No such file or directory. Cannot open SCSI driver.
cdrecord: For possible targets try 'cdrecord -scanbus'. Make sure you are root.
cdrecord: For possible transport specifiers try 'cdrecord dev=help'.

Do those warnings indicate anything definite?

BTW I am running the 2.6.8 kernel which apparently has some issues with cd burning. But I have been running the kernel for a while with no problems. I did changed a few things just before encountering problems - I wiped out the windows partition on my machine and put my music files on the new linux partition I created in its place. Would that have any effect on cd burning??

Thanks,
Geo

satinet · 02-21-2005, 10:19 AM

Hello,

Okay,

It's seems like you are running into probs with K3b.

I would recommend getting the latest version which over comes the problems with 2.6.8 kernels

Also upgrade cdrao and cdrecord etc....

Secondly stop using ide-scsi emulation - this isn't need in 2.6.x kernels, so take that line out of lilo.conf and run /sbin/lilo

I believe this will resolve your problems. I would go to the k3b homepage and compile it yourself (easy with the instructions on the site - honest!).

Cheers

geomatt · 02-21-2005, 01:26 PM

Thanks for the suggestions.
Looks like this is not really a hardware question but a software question (could some kind moderator move it perhaps??). A relief because hardware issues use cost a lot to fix....

I upgraded cdrtools (cdrecord) and compiled k3b from source. (For some reason I couldn't get the latest Slackware package working - but compiling from source worked.) Still had the same results - didn't work. So I booted the old kernel that was still lying around on my hard drive - 2.4.26. And I did a test burn and it worked!! So I tried another one - the project that originally failed and started me doubting the integrity of the cdrw drive. And that worked!

So I still have no clue why this problem suddenly arose, and whether I should even bother with using the 2.6.8 kernel anymore - it was fun to compile and all, but maybe I don't need it.

Cheers,
geomatt

satinet · 02-21-2005, 01:40 PM

are you sure you've taken the line

ide=scsi out of your lilo.conf for the new kernel. I can almost guarantee that is your problem, if you haven't

make sure you /etc/fstab file corresponds to the device that udev creates in /dev/ (probably hdc)

vi /etc/lilo.conf
/sbin/lilo

Hope I am not being patronising here!!

And make sure you didn't include ide=scsi emulation in yout kernel compile. You don't want that loaded as a module or worse in the kernel.

Also, you might as well use kernel 2.6.10 as it offers better support for hardware etc and the k3b that you made will work with it....

trust me!!#

geomatt · 02-21-2005, 02:12 PM

Of course I trust you! And no you are not being patronizing...

I forgot to say that ide=scsi is not mentioned in lilo.conf. If that module is showing up when I run lsmod that must mean it is compiled into the kernel, right? I guess that was a mistake, but then when I compiled the new kernel I just made wild guesses about many things.

Here is my fstab entry for the cd drive:

Code:

/dev/cdrom       /mnt/cdrom       iso9660     noauto,users,ro   0   0

So do you think it is worth forging ahead with an attempt to compile 2.6.10?? I would just go back to 2.4.26 except the sound card isn't working in that one and I guess udev won't work either (the reason for upgrading in the first place), not to mention the fact that going back would be admitting defeat.

-geo

satinet · 02-21-2005, 03:51 PM

Yes, never admit defeat!!! lol

don't include the ide=scsi module and press on with 2.6.10

you're nearly there.

I'm using 2.6.9 and k3b 0.11.20, with an IDE cdrw/dvd combo drive, no problems....

check that the /dev/cdrom symbolic link is actually pointing to the proper device - probably hdc

Code:

 lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root 3 2005-02-21 20:16 /dev/cdrom -> hdc

As you can see from the time stamp - this was created today when i booted up - showing udev in action.....

geomatt · 02-21-2005, 04:17 PM

Yes I do have that same symlink pointing to hdc.

As for compiling a new kernel, I was looking at my current .config file and couldn't figure out exactly which option to exclude. Will it be obvious when I run make oldconfig or is there something expressed in a slightly different way that I should look for?

Is this the culprit?

CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IDESCSI=m

Thanks for the help!
-geo

geomatt · 02-21-2005, 07:51 PM

satinet,
Good news, and, of course, you were right.....
Just compiled and installed a brand new kernel - 2.6.10 and got rid of ide-scsi. And k3b is playing nice again.

-geo

satinet · 02-22-2005, 03:42 AM

Hi,

Yes that was the culrpit!

Looks like people are finally listening to me

Most of the linux stuff I know involves getting dodgy hardware to work.
I've got a couple of tape drives to try next on a SCSI card...

gulp...

Glad to help.