CD-ROM Issues

[Matthew D. Cristantello]

Hey All,

I've been lurking on the mailing list for about a month now, am hoping
you can help me with an inexplicable issue with my cdrom drive. Sorry
about the length of this message, but I'm trying to include all relevant
info.

The short version is that whenever I put in a cd and try to mount it, my
computer hard crashes. If I fiddle with /etc/fstab a bit and change the
fstype to 'auto' instead of 'iso9660', it doesn't crash and I get an
error message instead (details below).

I'm running debian unstable (sid) fully up to date (I ran 'apt-get
update' then 'apt-get dist-upgrade' today), on a 2.4.22 kernel.
matt at mongoose:~$ uname -a
Linux mongoose 2.4.22 #2 Thu Nov 6 20:41:31 EST 2003 i686 GNU/Linux

I'm pretty sure the permissions to /dev/hdc are not the problem, as I've
tried mounting both as me (matt, who is a member of the audio group) and
as root. Permissions are as follows:

matt at mongoose:~$ ls -al /dev/hdc
brw-rw----    1 root     audio     22,   0 Jul  5  2000 /dev/hdc

My entry in /etc/fstab is:
/dev/hdc        /cdrom          auto    defaults,ro,user 	0 0

but this entry causes the system to lock up on mounting:
/dev/hdc        /cdrom          is09660  defaults,ro,user	0 0

Here's what I get when I attempt to mount:
matt at mongoose:~$ mount /cdrom/
/dev/hdc: Input/output error
mount: I could not determine the filesystem type, and none was specified

The kernel is detecting the drive at boot, I get these messages from
kern.log:
Nov  6 23:05:21 mongoose kernel: hdc: SAMSUNG SCR-3232, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM
drive
Nov  6 23:05:21 mongoose kernel: hdc: attached ide-cdrom driver.
Nov  6 23:05:21 mongoose kernel: hdc: ATAPI 32X CD-ROM drive, 128kB
Cache, DMA
Nov  6 23:05:21 mongoose kernel: Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.12

As suggested over at the LDP CDROM-HOWTO, I tried these commands and got
the following results:
matt at mongoose:~$ dd if=/dev/cdrom of=/dev/null bs=2048
dd: reading `/dev/cdrom': Input/output error
0+0 records in
0+0 records out
0 bytes transferred in 3.295555 seconds (0 bytes/sec)
matt at mongoose:~$ dd if=/dev/hdc of=/dev/null bs=2048
dd: reading `/dev/hdc': Input/output error
0+0 records in
0+0 records out
0 bytes transferred in 4.065978 seconds (0 bytes/sec)

The thing that really confuses me is that my cd drive worked fine a few
months ago (this has been an ongoing problem), but it worked perfectly
when I put in a Knoppix CD last night and booted off that. So it's
definitely something wrong with my kernel or system configuration, but I
can't figure out what.

Thanks in advance for your help!
~Matt


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"Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means
for going backwards."
-Aldous Huxley
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        Matthew D. Cristantello
        matt at crazy42.org
        716-472-3833 (cell)
        AIM: Matt977
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