[COLUG] AOpen DVD drive issue

[Thomas W. Cranston]

William Yang wrote:
> 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
Take it back and demand that they put a decent mobo in it if that's the 
case.