ATAPI Device hdb problem...
 

This appears from time to time on my Fedora Core 3.

Has anybody gone through this???
I am desperate... :(

I saw your old post about this too, I honestly don't know. It could be a hardware error - which drive is hdb, is it your CD-ROM drive? Does it work fine / is it able to read CD's and DVD's fine?

Where does this message pop up - on bootup, in logfiles, in dmesg?

Here goes...

Yes, it´s my CD-ROM.
As a matter of fact yes. Since this message regards ATAPI, I rebooted the machine (running FSCK on next reboot), mounted my hdb and read a CD. It worked fine. I visited a lot of directories etc. And everything went Ok.
Very weird, this one... Everytime I run dmesg it pops up again. And not just once... It keeps popping up, line after line. I don´t know if it is happening today, because yesterday, I went o another terminal (alt+ctrl+x) and tried to kill a process that stalled the machine. Even with the kill -9 flag I couldn´t kill it, so I rebooted the machine. And then when it started up again, I rebooted and ran FSCK another time. After that all became normal. I´m goinna take a look today when I come home to see if everything is working fine...

Anyway, does the fact that it happens during dmesg ring any bells?

I´d really like some help to solve this one... I feel like the linuxbox is my son due to all the effort I´ve put into it. I´m a newbie after all. This is not like something I can do all over again in a blink (dhcpd, httpd, sshd, iptables, etc).

Well, for what it's worth, I've never seen anything like this before. First off, I'd say upgrade to the latest kernel - I believe dmesg is all the messages from the kernel, and there's always a small chance it's some kernel bug, or some quirk of your cd-rom drive or ide adapter is unsupported in the version you're running now.

Next, if that doesn't fix the problem (and I'm assuming it won't), Maybe try putting the CD-ROM on a different IDE cable - maybe make it HDC, or HDD?

Double-check the BIOS settings for the CD-ROM drive, try re-detecting it in the BIOS, and all that jazz.

I feel like I'm grabbing at straws here, but hopefully one of these will fix the problem.

I don´t know how, but things got back to normal...
As I said: I´m goinna take a look today when I come home to see if everything is working fine...

Well... Everything is working really fine!!! Wich is a good thing because I don´t have a clue of how can I do the things you told me on the reply. :)
But anyway knowledge is a journey, and I just started mine. Hopefully I will learn how to update the kernel to a later version, but I just would want to learn smoothly... Not having to learn because of some problem...

Back to the post -- Dmesg is running fine, everything else seems to work Ok.
PS.: Do you know where can I find very much newbie information on updating kernel, changing my "hdb" letters etc.

By the way, thanks a lot.