I have had 3 cdrom drives that have been damaged during failed boots of the live CD's. Please note the failed boot is *not* caused by an error with the cd config. The error is caused when you reboot the cd some time through the boot system. I have a failed drive on my Compaq at work and two other makes of OEM drives at home (unsure of makes at the moment). The end result is a drive that does not respond to power at all. It's almost as if a fuse is blown inside the cdrom unit. The eject button does not work and there is no notificaiton in the motherboard bios on the next reboot that the drive even exists. I have tried swapping power cables round from a drive that works and this has not been the problem. There is little point in putting the drive into another PC as it is not switching it's self on at boot up. It's as if the Gentoo boot scripts modify a setting for the cdrom in some way. When the computer is rebooted via a hard power reset rather than via the "reboot" scripts we don't seem to be undoing the script setting. As far as I can tell the drive has been totally killed :-( The cd drive's in question vary in age and makes. Some are 10 months+ old and others are less than 3 months old with no notice of a problem at all. All drives used to work fine with other linux distro's i.e. redhat, slackware, debian, openbsd. Reproducible: Didn't try Steps to Reproduce: 1. insert live cdrom into system and boot. 2. wait till part way through the boot process and press the reset button. 3. wait for the pc to reboot and try to eject the cdrom from the drive. Actual Results: If you can eject the cdrom your ok, if not then when the pc reboots you may have a dead cdrom drive. The only way to get your CD out is with the manual eject hole and a long thin item to poke in it Expected Results: the cdrom drive to still be working and have power. Perhaps something is set when we auto detect the cdrom device that knocks it out?
My experiences is in relation to the both the America's Army GameCD and the 1.4_rc4 cd.
Please see the following for others who have had the same problem: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=53201
We are taking this bug report very seriously, even though at this point were not sure what could make the livecd cause it, as we are not doing anything beyond the normal. I will post any updates.
Sorry to hear that your CD-ROM died! The only thing we do from the GameCD is use the standard "hdparm" command to set the drive spindown timeout to the maximum value. That is pretty standard stuff, and shouldn't cause drives to fail unless the drive firmware happens to have major issues or there is some mechanical issue with the design of the drive. However, we'll remove the hdparm tweak from the next build of the GameCD just to be safe. Thank you for this bug report.
Note that apparently only our GameCD uses hdparm. Our 1.4_rc4 CD doesn't do any tweaking at all, so if this is happening with the 1.4_rc4 CD then it sounds like a drive issue.
Yes, this has happened with both the live game cd and the 3 stage install cd. :-( It has happened in 3 different drives, that are in use on different pc's with different motherboards etc. I find it hard to believe that all 3 drives were due to die totally, not even the eject button works any more and its not even seen by the pc's bios when rebooting the computer. You can even move the cdrom drive to another PC and its still not auto-detected at bootup. I've never had a cdrom drive die on me in this way in the last 10 years! The first time I didn't match it up with a Gentoo cd's, but the other two were caused by using the cd's to boot from. One of them was a Compaq drive and the other's were OEM drives. It seems to happen when you reboot half way through booting from the cdrom on the system. From looking at the report on the forum's it appears that I'm not the only one who's having this problem.
This is probably related to the eject command and/or the LG CDROM issue. This has been resolved, since my LG CDROM is one of the few still working in this office. (Yes, I did actually test it recently) Maybe we should post a note on the website that anyone with 1.4rc4 or the game CD should get a newer version. But then again, this bug is so old and inactive that we can probably just close it and get on with life.
yes, this was the lg cdrom issue, shame that it killed quite a few cdroms using many different distros.
