Once my epic battle to get the proprietary ati-drivers to work with my X800XT ended I had to embark on my next major hardware struggle which was getting DVD playback to function properly. So, there are two issues here. The first is a BIOS/Windows dual booting issue, and the second appears to be a purely udev/permissions issue.
Problem #1: I have a dual-boot machine with Gentoo and Windows XP on seperate SATA hard disks. These disks used to be in a Raid 0 array until I was unfortunate enough to have one of the drives fail and take down all my data across both drives with it. I since learned my lesson and am no longer running Raid 0. I've got a Dell 8400 which uses the Intel ICH6 chipset for the SATA operation. However, when the stupid tech came out to replace my busted HD under warranty last spring, he changed my bios settings to "Combination" mode instead of "Raid Autodetect / AHCI (Default)" and thus effectively crippled my hard drives.
Well, now that the semester is over I'm trying to fix this mess, but it's somewhat ugly. Since Windows was installed while the BIOS was set to this retarded Combination mode, it only thinks of the drives as being set up in that fashion, and I have no idea how to change it so as to recognize the drives when I change the mode (it just kernel panics almost immediately and reboots right after the splash screen shows up for a second or two). So, any windows gurus out there know how to fix this without totally reinstalling that godforsaken OS? (because I certainly haven't done
that enough times)
Problem #2: Once I started mucking with my BIOS settings, I was finally able to get DMA enabled which I was told was the holy grail of smooth DVD playback (which previously one could barely even call playback). Right now I've got it such that if I start mplayer as root, I can play a DVD with no problems at all. However, if I try to as a regular user (who is a member of the disk and cdrom groups) I get terrible playback. I don't quite understand how UDEV works in its entirety, but as far as I can tell I'm assuming I need to modify something there. I've looked at its config files and everything related to /dev/hdd (my DVD drive) appears to be mapped to disk or cdrom...so I'm not sure what I need to do here.
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Christopher Conroy
