[ILUG-Social] Help the struggling newbie?

[Paul Matthews]

Seems to be some problem with my cd-rom (a rite-on ltn262, 16x, IDE ATAPI)-

Using RedHat v7 (but problem seems to be general)

On rebooting with a RH boot disk and the CD in the drive it gets as far as 
running /sbin/loader - without the CD in the drive it gets as far as asking for 
the CD to be inserted and then hangs.

If I go to the trouble of creating a Debian partition, copying the CD, and 
installing from there the install goes through fine- but as soon as the CD is 
accessed from RedHat it's game over- interrupt timeout (both hdd and cd-rom 
lights glow constantly, and neither can be unmounted so I would guess the whole 
IDE subsystem has been comprehensively shafted. However I could probably 
rebuild the kernel if I had to (I've done that, oh, once before)

Debian (vintage 1.3, circa 1997) gives a bit more info- irq timeout: 
status=0x58, and this at least has the common decency to do an ATAPI reset and 
carry on.

blah blah ATAPI blah not in 100% native mode- will probe IRQ later- could this 
be relevant?

There is one hit on this with a web search (google), but it is in Spanish and 
there is no reply to it anyway- sounds like the same problem though.

What I have tried:
1. Ripping all unnecessary hardware out, disabling all serial and parallel 
ports in the BIOS.
2. cd-rom drive as slave on ide1 and master on ide2. Even slave on ide2.
3. messing around with stuff in the bios- switching from lba to normal amongst 
others.
4. wiggling wiggleable things, poking pokeable things, and cursing most things.

Without wishing to sound like a complete tosser- it all works fine in Windows.

One (possible) clue is that I am pretty sure it all worked in RedHat 4.2 (not 
got the CD any more) and apparently the ATAPI stuff was rewritten at some stage?

Any, wits end- any help would be much appreciated, and may be expressed in pint 
form at the next ILUG drinks (which I keep meaning to show up for).

Paul (all this for a game of xboing <g>)