On Mon, Apr 23 2001, Morten Bo Johansen wrote:
Yesterday with pre2 I had dire problems, so many that I gave up on making a proper bug report but basically it freaked out completely with scsi host resetting errors and kernel panic messages that took control over my tty + kbd when I tried to do the formatting part - and I was not able to log anything either. Eventually I had to push the big button.
Ugh
I tried again today with pre3 and still I don't get past the formatting hurdle. Here's what happens when I try to format a disc:
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root@olafrye:/home/mojo# cdrwtool -d /dev/sr1 -q using device /dev/sr1 768KB internal buffer setting write speed to 12x Settings for /dev/sr1: Fixed packets, size 32 Mode-2 disc
I'm going to do a quick setup of /dev/sr1. The disc is going to be blanked and formatted with one big track. All data on the device will be lost!! Press CTR L-C to cancel now.
Initiating quick disc blank Disc capacity is 274944 blocks (549888KB/537MB) Formatting track
Writing UDF structures to disc 7200 (CEST)/-120
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While writing those structures my system freezes completely and once again I have to resort to power recycling.
Very strange. What happens here is that cdrwtool writes out 64kB packets with the UDF data structures, so it should be a relatively painless operation. I'm very curious as to why this would hang the system.. Any chances of setting up a serial console and capturing kernel messages??
Surely my system consists of some cheapo hardware, the cdrw device being a Phillips CDD 3610, but I think it ought to work anyway.
Yes it should
There are two things I noticed from the output above:
1) that cdrwtool sets the writing speed to 12x by default while my drive is only capable of 2x. I suspect that it should not really matter and that using 12x would just mean that the maximum speed of my drive is being used but nevertheless I might ask: do you think that it might make a difference setting the speed with the "t" parameter..?
Nope, the 12 is just a random "high" number so that the speed isn't set too low. It prints 12 because cdrwtool doesn't do the usual - set high speed - read back current speed from drive - print speed because I was lazy when I wrote it.
2) The disc capacity is being calculated as 537 mb - why..?
Because that's the capacity :-). Fixed packet cd-rw writing does waste some space on the media, ~540 meg is about right.
As for the rest I have followed the install instructions in the readme file meticulously. I have compiled with modules and I have enabled write caching and retained the default of 256 kb of data gathering buffer. I got the UDF cvs tree and compiled and installed the udf module. Prior to this I bumped up my kernel version to 2.4.4-pre6 and rebooted.
Write caching is a no-no, but it has no effect when you do the above cdrwtool command. It sounds like you did it right, and I'd love for you to setup some sort of serial logger and grab some kernel messages. Alternatively, stay in the console and stop syslog and see if it prints anything before going down. -- Jens Axboe