checking for bad media

[George Georgalis]

On Sun, Oct 31, 2004 at 02:50:10PM -0500, George Georgalis wrote:
>
>It looks like a media problem but the media reads fine on another box,
>and two (new) cdrom drives give the exact problem.  I'm going to try
>installing something else on it and see what happens...
>

oddest hardware failure ever. in my last tests both the disk and cdrom
where put on the same channel, it doesn't seem to matter if it's the
primary or secondary ide, the cdrom works accept for some sectors.
which means I can use most of the dfly disk, accept anything that requires
csh/tcsh. With openbsd everything seems to work accept the misc.tgz
package (cdrom read errors)... then it says congratulations you have
successfully installed, but it won't work without that.

with knoppix, I booted and ran badblocks -v -w on the disk, without
error; but (on the same ribbon) badblocks -v on the cdrom revealed read
errors after several minutes. With similar results via sysresccd.

I find this all very odd. Has anyone heard of a failed board that only
has problems controlling a cdrom, midway into the disk, while a disk on
the same ribbon has no problems?

// George

-- 
George Georgalis, systems architect, administrator Linux BSD IXOYE
http://galis.org/george/ cell:646-331-2027 mailto:george at xxxxxxxxx