On Sun, Jun 15, 2008 at 11:26 PM, Barry Gershenfeld <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>> Last night I spent a couple of hours muttering about incompatible
>> changes in K3b from Fedora 3 to Centos 5.1 that caused me to waste a
>> couple of DVD blanks...
>
>> More investigation shows that my NEC ND-3550A CD/DVD reader/writer
>> seems to have lost the ability to _read_ anything. But it still
>> writes. I don't understand this. I thought that there was only one
>> read/write head.
>
> I wonder if going back to Fedora 3 would magically cure it?
>
> Try it under Knoppix or DSL or whatever...
I can't get back to Fedora 3 very easily. The reason for the OS
change was a partial clobbering of the Fedora 3 system drive. I could
not boot it, but was able to copy all the data to another drive, using
a RAM-disk based OS. Interesting exercise, since the file system was
done on top of LVM.
I remain confused. I put the suspect drive into a USB box, and tried
it with a couple of different computers. Fedora Core 6 on the
Thinkpad laptop, and CentOS 5.1 on the Dell mini-server. Both systems
were able to use the drive to read my test discs, one home-burned CD,
one pressed DVD, and one home-burned DVD. On the CentOS system, where
the first problems ocurred, I was able to read the DVD and check it
byte-for-byte with the file from which it was made.
The only thing I did to the NEC drive was take it out of the Dell
server, and remove the shield plate from the bottom of the drive. I
decided that I could not easily get to where the head was to clean it,
so I reassembled the drive and today put it into a USB box, with the
results noted above.
carl
--
carl lowenstein marine physical lab u.c. san diego
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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