mandrake 9.1
 

Hi,
I'm having troubles with my CDROM and I think I'm not the only one with mandrake 9.1. When I insert a CD it start reading, reading and reading then the computer completely freeze but my CDROM is still reading the friking CD. What's the problem, can't linux handle a god damn CDROM or what? it's working perfectly under Windows and always did, even windows 3.1 would handle it, I mean, come on. (Sorry I had to say that) I'm just upset because it's the first time I have put a linux to work (almost) on my computer and having a problem with my CDROM is the last problem I would have think of having, I'm damned or something.


Thanks for any help,
Max (deseperated).

it's probably the supermount. Disable it:
1. open a terminal window
2. become root using the command su
3. do
supermount -i disable
4. reboot

When you do this, you will have to mount your CDs manually. In a terminal window
mount /mnt/cdrom

Before ejecting the cdrom you'll have to unmount it:
umount /mnt/cdrom

and I think it's best to eject manually by
eject

Supermount is meant to make this a lot easier but it's buggy. There are some tools that make like a bit easier but first see if what I'm suggesting works at all.
If it does work, start
Kcontrol center->configuration->hardware->kwikdisk
this can handle the mounting of cdroms and floppies.

Supermount is buggy as hell on 9.1. Sometimes it will just keep reading for ever until I 'killall mount', sometimes it will refuse to mount a perfectly good CD, other times it has caused a frickin kernel panic! The weird part is that sometimes it works just fine, for example when tossing in discs when running urpmi or rpmdrake the CDROM drive *always* works like a charm, which pretty much just causes further frustration. I usually just edit my fstab first thing on a new MDK install to fix the supermount problem, but sometimes I give it another try... since it works most of the time and can save time... if it doesn't panic things.

It caused me no end of problems on 9.0 as well. For some reason I think 8.2 worked fine. I only hope that 9.2 has improved this situation somewhat, as it is constantly being talked about as a big problem amongst MDK users.

not that i have anything new to add but so far to this date, I have never had a problem with supermount. maybe i'm lucky:D

As another thought, does this happen with all your CDs? All your data CDs? All your music CDs? Just trying to narrow things down in the event that it isn't supermount.

I've used 9.1 since it came out stable, and on 3 different computers never had trouble.. but that's not to suggest that you aren't having troubles... computers are buggy sometimes. For every Linux "bug" I can point to, I can also point to Windows "bugs" that I used to experience. I think its just the nature of the beast.

I have a CD-writer and a DVD ROM. Mandrake 9.1 sets up the CD-writer as pseudo-SCSI (so does Windows, by the way) else it would not work. I thought I would do the same to the DVD-ROM and I find it reads more quickly and reliably as a result.

All you have to do is to run KDE Control Centre and select System>Boot Manager (LILO). You have to log into it using the root password. If the CD-ROM in question is currently at /dev/hdc you add to the extra parameters entry on the Operating Systems tab the following:

hdc=ide-scsi

You can find out if it is /dev/hdc by using Konqueror to look at your /dev folder.

Anyway, after you save the changes in KDE Control Centre and reboot, your CD-ROM will automatically be set up as a pseudo-SCSI device.

DAVE

and how do I do that with Gnome? by the way I tried to disable supermount but dosent works.... still do the same thing.

Too bad disabling supermount did not work - you can re-enable it by
supermount -i enable

the hdc=ide-scsi thing. It's probably already taken care of. Take a look at /etc/lilo.conf. This sets up the bootloader. Under the entry for linux, see what it says in the line starting with
append=

if there is something like hdc=ide-scsi in there, you're all set.

hi,

I looked in /ect/lilo.conf and I only see hda=ide-scsi, should i change that to hdc or add a new one with hdc and leave the hda one ?

by the way what is hda and hdc? is it how my cd-rom is plugged into my comp ? if yes if i switch it could it do the trick? like switching from master to slave or vise versa ?

hda is probably your cdrom and hdc your harddrive. You can check in your /etc/fstab. If it has lines like
/dev/hdc1 / etc.etc.
then you're fine.

/dev/hdc6 / ext3 defaults 1 1
none /dev/pts devpts mode=0620 0 0
/dev/scd0 /mnt/cdrom ext2 user,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,noauto,ro 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,sync,unhide,noauto,nosuid,umask=0,user,nodev 0 0
/dev/hdc1 /mnt/windows ntfs iocharset=iso8859-1,ro,umask=0 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hdc5 swap swap defaults 0 0

Is scd0 my cdrom drive?

yup. scd0 is your cdrom. It is being treated as a scsi device; otherwise, it would show up as /dev/hda so you're all set as the ide-scsi business goes.

btw, does your cdrom problem persist after rebooting? I notice you have supermount disabled.

yes, but now I messed up the whole thing, I changed my CDROM from master to slave, and now it dosent work at all, how do I probe new hardware?

can you still boot? If you can, edit the /etc/lilo.conf. What you need to do is to change the hda=ide-scsi to hdc=ide-scsi

also comment out the line for cdrom in /etc/fstab (just place a # in front of the line). When you reboot, the relevant entries should be recreated.