FYI, Mandrake recently announced new 9.2 ISO images are available with all the bugfixes pre-installed. So this issue has been resolved.

I have an LG GCE-8480B and it seems to have not been affected by mandrake 9.2. I did however burn the downloaded iso's onto CD so perhaps they included the so called fix that they were supposed to release. Or maybe my CD drive is just unaffected by it.

send it back as defective.

does anybody know exactly what program, and when that command is issued?
would it take looking up the exact command in the specs, and using a
debugger on the installer files to find where the command is?

Ok, I've been lurking for a while and hoped that this issue would be dropped, but since no one seems to want to read the articles on it, let me explain. This is a problem ONLY if you have a copy of Mandrake 9.2 that was downloaded withing the first couple months of it being released, AND if you have an LG CD-ROM that is ONLY a CD-ROM. (i.e. not a burner, DVD-ROM, etc)

The porblem was not a bug in Mandrake. The problem was that LG decided not to follow the standards that have been laid down when building thier CD-ROMs. At some point ing the original release of 9.2, the install progy sent a buffer flush command to the optical drive without checking to see what kind of drive it was. This command should only be understood by CD burners and DVD-ROMs, by the ATAPI standards, a vanilla CD-ROM should simply ignore the command. Yes, this is explicitly in the standard. For whatever reason, LG decided it would be a good idea to use that command to instruct the CD-ROM to be ready to recieve a firmware update. After that, any signal sent to the CD-ROM is written to the firmware. This is a bad thing. Once Mandrake got wind of it, they did the only thing they could do. They quickly turned around and threw in some code that identified the optical drive and only sent tthe command to drives that SHOULD respond to the command.

To recap: this was not a bug with Mandrake, this is an example of what happens when a hardware company blatantly ignores standards that they claim they follow.

Oh, and I don't suppose the moderators would un-sticky this thread because it seems to be causing new folks to think that the new copies of 9.2 still have this problem.

Have fun folks!

Too late for me...

I apparently have an LG drive and tried to install 9.2 using some CD's I bought online. I attempted an install and found out about this issue after the fact. My CD and DVD drives are not recognized!!!

It seems that there is a fix for this problem, but I don't have a floppy drive!!!

Is there hope to save this CD drive??? (GCR-8481B)

*sniff sniff*

hook the drives up to someone else's machine, and run the firmware update fix
from there.

Good point whansard!

I've never opened my tower before, but it looks like it may be time! How hard can it be...

I also need to find a willing transplant recipient with a floppy. None of my friends actually have one. I did find a floppy for less than $10 shipped, online: http://store.yahoo.com/spcomputer/sa1fldr35dr.html. It may be an easier option...

make sure you have a floppy cable, and a place to hook one
up on your motherboard.

thanks!

i didn't consider that it might not come with a cable...

i did check and there is an available bay to add a floppy

Do you know of any reason why I can't use one of the CD-Rom drives listed below?

$16 - http://store.yahoo.com/livewarehouse/mmsm11630.html

$9 - http://www.softwareandstuff.com/DRV10338.html

It may be the easiest fix of all since LG told me that the drive *might* not be fixable....

Thank you for clarifying this for everyone, it's a useful bit of info beyond "it breaks your drive"

This moderator won't, not yet anyway. It makes sense to have this stickied, IMHO, until the next release of Mandrake comes out, as it's very likely a new user will be using the most current release that is not beta, and they may indeed have a copy of 9.2 that has this bug...

Cool

since this problem is only supposed to affect cdrom drives, maybe your
dvd isn't working just because it's on the cable with the cdrom drive?

maybe you could get somebody to put the firmware update on a cdr or
cdrw for you. and put the working drive or a borrowed one on the cable
as a slave to your hard drive. have the bad drive on a cable by itself.
maybe that's a another way.

Thanks for the advice whansard...!

I certainly hope that the dvd+r is only disabled due to the cd-rom woes...

Since I'm dirt poor right now, I think I'm gonna bum a floppy drive off of a friend of a friend and see if we can get things up and running. I probably won't do too much tinkering with the dell since I can live w/o the cd-rom for a few days and I have my handy YDL ibook

Oh yeah..., Master C, please keep this posted "stickied," since I'm sure there are others like me who are just now jumping on the 9.2 bandwagon. I bought 9.2 PowerPack from a reputable online source and ended up with a headache and broken CD-ROM drive...