Mandrake, Dell and the great LG CDROM fiasco !!

[web mack 0]

Is there any chance that between the 3 of them—LG, DELL and MANDRAKE they could get their act together and attack this Linux 9.2 installation problem whereby certain LG cdrom drives are trashed.

As a user and customer I should not have to trawl all 3 websites looking for stupid GIFS and badly worded explanations on various drives affected and zip files to download and BIOS’s to flash etc etc etc.

Almost all the useful information I have found has come from discussion forums and fellow users.

I want a proper description of the problem in understandable English with all the resources to fix this problem in one location.

Get a grip !!

[Dapper Dan 0]

You didn't say pretty please..

[psheldon 0]

Web Mack, Linux is broken! My Samsung sw-252b and swopping a LG GCE 8525B works in Redhat 8.0 but not in Fedora Core 1 or 2 neither with Slackware 10.0.

 

Drives work in Redhat 8 kernel 2.4.18, which makes me beleive that something is broken in the Linux upgrade.

 

 

[martouf 0]

you mean this document is written in a forgotten language? 8)

 

Check the list at the bottom to see if you have one of the affected LG drives.

 

If you need further assistance, let us know.

 

 

 

[psheldon 0]

Yes, because I can't seem to find the 8525B. in the list. Webmac didn't specify and I am only going on what I see which is RH8 works fine but not FC1 or FC2 or Slack 10. Threfore LINUX is broke. :-) BTW I have them all installed.

regards peter

 

[Whiskers 0]

er if it was me, I'd throw away the LG drive and get a Plextor, have you gone that route of just getting a new drive that is compatible?

[danleff 0]

I think that the issue is compatability, not the firmware issue of the LG drive necessarily. However, the LG issue was with a specific version of Mandrake, probably a little fault on both sides. LG drives are inexpensive, but you suffer from the issue of complete compatability.

 

I have the same issue with a generic dvd burner drive.

 

I bet that if you look further into the issue, you will find that between all the distros that you have, there are various kernel versions on your system. The 2.4 series of kernels handle these drives differently (ide-scsi module) than the 2.6 series kernels (ide-cd module). I also guess that the upgrade from FC1 to 2 was a problem. Linux sees these drives as scsi devices and have to be set up accordingly. So, your Grub or Lilo entries have to reflect this, for each distro and kernel version that is on your system.

 

Choose which distro and version that you want to have as your main working system and we can go from there.

[Whiskers 0]

Along the same lines as previous post, I just searched for your burner on the net, you're giving yourself a big headache over a cheap $40 burner.

[psheldon 0]

Upgrade ? No, new install of FC2 from the iso's I grub boot to RH8 or FC1 or Slackware.

 

Cheap? that is relative :-) the difference in price between a "so-called" cheap drive (where I am I don't call them cheap :-))

and say a plextor is actaully huge IF one can get them.

 

As I said before what I find perculiar is that RH8 writing works just fine but not in the others. I suspect the ATAPI code is a problem.

 

I do have hdd=ide-scsi in grub and I have symlinked the "cdrom" to sg0 in /dev/

 

So what I have to do if I want to burn is just reboot to RH8 :-)

 

thanks guys

regards

peter

 

[danleff 0]

Quote:

I do have hdd=ide-scsi in grub and I have symlinked the "cdrom" to sg0 in /dev/

In FC 2, I can't remember what the default kernel in FC1 is, kernel 2.6 does not use ide-scsi, but ide-cd.

I'll have to look at my grub file. So, if you have an append line in Grub for FC2 (oops, I guess append a lilo term) hdd=ide-scsi, this will mess things up. Take it out and see what happens, if this is the case.

Oh, just in case. Make sure that the cdrom/dvd drives have the correct designation. You have two drives hooked up at once?

So, depending on how many connections to your ide interface there are active, one may be hdc and one hdd.

Look at the command dmesg in a console window. See what the drives (if they are recognized) are designated as. Are they hdc or/and hdd?
[Edited by danleff on 2004-08-21 07:29:53]

[Whiskers 0]

Well yes they are cheap, for a cd burner at least, cd burners have always been a luxury, and required big bucks, I remember paying $340 for my 4x burner back in the day, today they are still a luxury item, expect to pay around $100 for a good burner (I paid around $120 for my Plextor Premium), despite the market being flooded with no-name burners selling for $20-$40, LG, Lite-On, Mad Dog, etc

 

Has LG offered any options to replace the affected models with non-affected model drives? I can just see, some newbie computer users with blank stares in their eyes firmware upgrade huh? Either way good luck to you, whatever you decide to do.