[COLUG] AOpen DVD drive issue

[William Yang]

Dave wrote:
> I got a new custom computer (from TCR in Pickerington) for my wife's 
> office and am having issues with the DVD drive. I burned a DVD of CentOS 
> 5 and it loads ok and brings up the first screen, but once I select to 
> install from the "CD-ROM" drive, it says it needs a driver. So I created 
> an image of the DVD on my Mac and did an ftp install which worked fine.

Based on the symptoms you've described, I don't think it's a hardware 
problem with the *drive*.  I think it's on your drive controller and/or 
mobo, and I think it's likely to be a software problem you can fix without 
going back to the store.

In particular, there are some cheap JMicron SATA/PATA chipsets that are 
getting used in modern boards.  The chipset support is not compiled into 
the installer kernels in Gentoo, Unbuntu, and others... though it is 
available in the mainline kernel tree.  Core symptom was that I could boot 
isolinux, but my installer OS wouldn't start because it couldn't find the 
CDROM/DVD drive.

'lspci' can probably tell you what's in your box.

Beyond the kernel, you may need to look at devfs and/or udev for your 
device files.  Those sometimes require configuration, too, but I'm thinking 
it could be an unsupported chipset for your install disk's kernel, even 
though such support *can* be added to the kernel.

I'd be surprised if a standard IDE DVD writer would have problems -- 
they're pretty generic.  It's possible you hit a defective one, but it's 
more probable that it's the mobo in my mind...

	-Bill
-- 
William Yang
wyang at gcfn.net