Re: [Hampshire] Saving an old DVD drive

Roger Munford wrote:
> I have just rescued an old Win 98 PC from the skip and brought it back
> to life by installing Ubuntu.
> There is just one snag. The DVD drive worked for the installation and
> works playing audio CDs but when I tried playing a DVD with the movie
> player, the intro played but then I got an error presumably when the
> main video should start.
> I tried again with VLC but got an "error reading block 0 "
> dmesg gives "__ratelimit: 37 callbacks suppressed" followed by a 10
> lines of "Buffer I/O error on device sr0, logical block 177xx"
>
> I can browse the DVD and see the file names and sizes but I cannot copy
> a file off it dmesg giving a lot of "end_request I/O errors" and
> "attempt to access beyond end of device"

I have found that quite a few older PCs have failed CD or dvd drives.
In theory you could consider cleaning the lens, but I have had only
very limited success with that. I believe that the early technology of
such drives was short lived. From win98 I have not actually seen 'dvd'
drives - they have all been cd drives. Modern drives read at high
speed. Drives in older PCs are often rated, by modern standards, low
speed, indicating a poor sensitivity. A new dvd rw drive at the local
computer fair is 18 pounds.
good luck
--
alan cocks
Ubuntu user #10391
Linux user #360648