Re: funky hardware problem
Monte Milanuk wrote:
> 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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Well, your running an Pentium class system so that rules out improper jumper
settings on the hard drive controller :-D
Try to put the CD-ROM on its own IDE channel and configure it as the master
device. If that doesn't work try to diable the CD-ROM in the system BIOS and
then let Linux try to detect the device. Try passing a few arguments to LILO at
boot time (ex: ide1=autotune hdc=cdrom) and see what happens.
Stef
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