[COLUG] AOpen DVD drive issue

[Dave]

On May 10, 2007, at 1:30 PM, Thomas W. Cranston wrote:

> 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.
>

I specifically requested a mobo with one old style serial port since  
they still use an external serial modem for sending faxes and since  
we were buying 5 and I wanted to keep the price down I went with on  
board video and on board audio.

This is what it is: Intel DG965SSCK - I checked before ordering and  
according to Intel's site, there's support in recent Linux versions.

TCR has always been very good to me - they had two DVD SATA drives in  
stock and swapped those out for me so I now have two machines that  
have working DVD drives. I still have three with the original DVD  
drives that I may fight with a little bit or I may just have them  
order three more and swap them out.

Dave