[Wylug-help] CD-ROM detects intermittently

[James Holden]

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All,

A friend of mine is having weird problems with his IDE CD-ROM not
detecting on bootup on Mandrake 10.

Sometime's it's detected, and other times it's not.

When it isn't detected, the light on the drive comes on and stays on.
When it is, it flickers then stays off and the drive works OK.

The machine dual boots Windows 98 and the drive detected every time
under that.

The machine's a laptop, and the hard disk is hda and the CD-ROM is hdb
(ugh!).

He's mailed me the outputs of dmesg when it detects and when it doesn't,
and frankly the only difference is one line:

When it's not there:
Uniform Multi-Platform E-IDE driver Revision: 7.00alpha2
ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx
PIIX4: IDE controller at PCI slot 0000:00:07.1
PIIX4: chipset revision 0
PIIX4: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
~    ide0: BM-DMA at 0x1400-0x1407, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:DMA
hda: FUJITSU MHM2200AT, ATA DISK drive
Using anticipatory io scheduler
ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
hda: max request size: 128KiB
hda: 39070080 sectors (20003 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS=38760/16/63, UDMA(33)
~ /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0: p1 p2 < p5 p6 p7 >

When it is there:
Uniform Multi-Platform E-IDE driver Revision: 7.00alpha2
ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx
PIIX4: IDE controller at PCI slot 0000:00:07.1
PIIX4: chipset revision 0
PIIX4: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
~    ide0: BM-DMA at 0x1400-0x1407, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:DMA
hda: FUJITSU MHM2200AT, ATA DISK drive
hdb: CD-224E, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive       <-----CD-ROM detected
Using anticipatory io scheduler
ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
hda: max request size: 128KiB
hda: 39070080 sectors (20003 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS=38760/16/63, UDMA(33)
~ /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0: p1 p2 < p5 p6 p7 >

I'm wondering if it's some odd race condition caused by the CD-ROM
remaining busy after the BIOS attempts to boot from it.

Is there any IDE kernel parameters to force an extra IDE reset, or delay
IDE initialisation?

I'm stumped on this one. There's no aparrent pattern to it.


Any thoughts or similar experiences?

James


- --
James Andrew Holden, Leeds, UK    (james at jamesholden dot net)
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