I've just installed Slack 13.1, this was a "clean" install. All seems to be working well except for the dvd-rw, but this is a show stopper, if it doesn't get resolved in a few days I'll have to go back to 13.0.

The drive is detected correctly, but if a cd is mounted it gets errors, and is unable to set it up (it doesn't appear on the desktop).

Here is the info from dmesg:

ata3: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 300)
ata3.00: ATAPI: TSSTcorp CDDVDW SH-S223Q, SB03, max UDMA/100
ata3.00: configured for UDMA/100
scsi 2:0:0:0: CD-ROM TSSTcorp CDDVDW SH-S223Q SB03 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
sr0: scsi3-mmc drive: 48x/48x writer dvd-ram cd/rw xa/form2 cdda tray
Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.20
sr 2:0:0:0: Attached scsi CD-ROM sr0


And here are the errors:

May 27 10:52:06 darkstar kernel: Buffer I/O error on device sr0, logical block 142503
May 27 10:52:10 darkstar kernel: sr 2:0:0:0: [sr0] Unhandled sense code
May 27 10:52:10 darkstar kernel: sr 2:0:0:0: [sr0] Result: hostbyte=0x00 driverbyte=0x08
May 27 10:52:10 darkstar kernel: sr 2:0:0:0: [sr0] Sense Key : 0x3 [current]
May 27 10:52:10 darkstar kernel: sr 2:0:0:0: [sr0] ASC=0x11 ASCQ=0x5
May 27 10:52:10 darkstar kernel: sr 2:0:0:0: [sr0] CDB: cdb[0]=0x28: 28 00 00 04 59 4e 00 00 02 00
May 27 10:52:10 darkstar kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev sr0, sector 1140024


Any suggestions?

What do you mean by "a cd is mounted"?

Hmmm - that looks like either a corrupt CD, or the drive itself is going wonky. Can you perhaps test the following scenarios:

a) try different CD's and DVD's in the drive
b) boot off a USB stick with something like Puppy and try the CD's and DVD's again.

Good luck.

Do you have the same error if you try another CD?

Sorry, I need to be more precise. With Slack 13.0, if I put a cd in the drive, it would, after checking it, create a desktop icon, which you could then use to open the filesystem. This does not happen with Slack 13.1, the drive gets errors. I have tried many cd's, and 2 different drives on 2 different computers. If I issue a "mount" command such as :
mount /dev/sr0 /mnt/cdrom
it will mount the device and I can then read it.

One other point...if I insert a usb stick, the desktop icon gets created. Also, I am using xfce as my desktop.

It seems to be a udev/hal issue, but I'm not sure how to chase that down.

check the "/etc/fstab" for the dvd entry below; you probably have to add it?

/dev/sda2 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/sda10 / ext4 defaults 1 1
#/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom auto noauto,owner,ro 0 0
/dev/dvdwriter /media/dvd auto noauto,users,rw 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0

I did not have the dvd in fstab, so I tried it, and got the same result.

Cd reading(or rather - accessing a cd) is worse in 13.1 than it is in 12.1 - this is my user experience, tested on both releases on the same hardware. Hopefully someone founds what is causing this, for now i have to reboot into slack 12.1 to access some of the cd(r)-s from my data backup collection.

Are you using XFCE, KDE, or something else?

I am using XFCE.

I have tried using both a custom kernel (2.6.34) and huge-smp, and it doesn't make a difference which I use.

For the entry for the cdrom drive in fstab, try changing the default owner to user.
Change owner (default) to user. Then reboot and see if the CD automounts.

Also, make sure your user is a member of the cdrom group.

I'm running as root, so it's not a permissions issue.

I still think something has changed in the way hal/udev sets up the device. Before it even gets to mount, which is what you do with fstab, it has trouble recognizing the cd. I think that once that fails, the mount process isn't going to work.

I have same issue but I am upgrading(not fresh install).
I am using xfce as well. My external usb drives don't auto mount either.
It is not really a deal breaker for me as I really don't mind manually mounting devices.

I also get some really fast messages at boot about udevd it is so quick I can't read it and I can't find it in any logs. It says something is being removed from future versions or something.

I'm no specialist but HAL may not work if instructions described in file CHANGES_AND_HINTS.TXT are not followed:

I would suggest that you try to follow those instructions (especially points 1 & 3) even if you think that with your root account it does not matter.

At least we'll know the issue is somewhere else.

I had a similar problem with current that I was hoping would go away with a fresh install (since I have not done a fresh install since 12.1) but it did not. For me the problem only happens (at least so far) with burned cds (iso9660). Mounting the cds as root using the -t iso9660 option works just fine. Audio cds, dvds, and pressed cds work. And the burned cds mount for me with an entry in fstab. It's the automounting that I'm having a problem with.

To the best of my knowledge, the problem cropped up for me a while back in current. Was there not some change in the way cd drives were handled (something with scsi)? I know a similar thing happened to me before and the fix for me was to make sure certain drivers were loaded in a certain order. But that was back when the drive was using scsi.

I have yet to find anything that fixes my current mounting problems.
Other than item #4 (using a modified fdi) which I have not tried.

And I do not think it is a hardware problem because the cds in question work just fine in windows xp, some of the cds are bootable and will boot the machine just fine...it's only when I pop the cd in while running slackware that I get similar errors as above.