Bug#353942: SATA CD-ROM drives unnecessarily hard to get working

[Matthew Wilcox <matthew@wil.cx>]

Package: debian-installer
Version: 21-Feb-2006

My wife just got a shiny new Fujitsu Lifebook P7120 (thanks to Joey
Hess raving about it on Planet the other day).  I downloaded the latest
nightly build for Etch and tried to install it.  This far too much fun,
thanks to the SATA CD-ROM drive.

You see, to enable support for SATA CD-ROM drives, you have to set the
libata module parameter 'atapi_enabled=1'.  If libata were built in,
that would be the simple matter of passing 'libata.atapi_enabled=1'.
But it's a module, and even in expert mode, libata is loaded before
you get to a shell.  Busybox doesn't seem to have an rmmod command,
so you can't unload it and then load it with the option specified.
So you have to boot with BOOT_DEBUG=3 to get a shell prompt where you
'modprobe libata atapi_enabled=1'.

If this doesn't get fixed, the workaround needs to be documented.
I expect Fujitsu won't be the only people shipping SATA CD-ROMs during
the lifecycle of Etch.