funky hardware problem
A while back I 'rescued' an old P5-133 w/ 16MB of RAM to be a firewall
machine. The original CDROM didn't work, so I replaced it w/ another, and
replaced the HD w/ a WD 3.2GB HD. Everything seemed to work ok for a while,
but then the CD started acting up, i.e. whenever I inserted a disk, it would
sit there blinking non-stop, unable to access the CD. I robbed a CD drive
out of another machine, same thing?!!? Played musical chairs w/ the drives
on the ide cables, the whole nine yards. Nothing helped. Suddenly, the HD
started 'clunking' ominously. Went and got a 'new' 1.2GB HD from the local
computer shack for about $10-15, and magically everything worked perfectly.
Played around w/ it for a while, messed w/ RH 6.2 on the system. Now trying
Debian 2.2r2 on it, and it worked ok, other than it took literally a day or
so for it to crunch it's way thru the secondary install. Ended up rebooting
and installing the packages from dselect. But, again, one CD wouldn't be
recognized. It was an extra, so I wasn't too worried.
Now I'm to the point where ~50% of my CD's aren't recognized in the drive,
regardless of whether they are Debian install CD's, RedHat, CDRW's, music
CD's, whatever.
Anyone w/ a good idea of WTF is going on her please let me know. I'm at the
end of my rope on this one. This box is about one hop from the trash
dumpster if it doesn't get fixed soon. I've already expended far more in
time/effort/material than what the stupid thing is worth. Right now the
only thing keeping me working on it is a grudge match sort of thing ;)
TIA,
Monte
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