Hello Luggers
I've been struggling to get DVD-RAMs working properly for a few months
since I 'upgraded' to a Dell Optiplex machine that does everything in
SATA (rather than IDE).
Essentially, the issue seems to be that when accessing DVD-RAM disks,
commands such as 'mount' and 'fsck' return to the command line about 15
seconds before the light on the drive stops flashing. If my scripts
carry on with the next operation before the first is really complete,
all sorts of badness results, including permanently damaged DVD-RAM disks.
I've got round the problem now by liberally sprinkling my scripts with
'sleep 20', but I'd like to know why this is happening, and how to solve
it properly.
It was all working fine on my old computer, and there are a number of
differences:
Old New
--- ---
Computer Dell Optiplex 745 Home-made, Gigabyte mobo
Processor AMD x86 AMD 64x2
DVD-RAM drive PATA SATA
Chipset VIA VT82xxxx Intel 82801H (ICH8 Family)
Device /dev/hdd /dev/scd1
Kernel 2.6.17 2.6.21-2-amd64
Debian Testing/Unstable Stable/Testing
...which makes it difficult to pin down the cause. Googling hasn't
turned up anything useful, but I'm not really sure what to search for.
I've tried 3 different SATA DVD-RAM drives, and they all suffer from the
same problem, so I don't think it's a drive fault.
syslog sometimes has 'VFS: busy inodes on changed media' messages, even
when things seem to be working, which suggests some disagreement between
parts of the system about what state the drive is in.
And when the computer is writing to the DVD-RAM, the processors spend a
lot of time (over 90% sometimes) in a wait state, and the system load
soars. Is that normal?
Does anyone have any ideas what might be causing all this?
Is there a command that will tell me the state of the drive, so that I
can wait for it to be 'ready'?
cheers
Chris
--
Chris Dennis cgdennis@???
Fordingbridge, Hampshire, UK
