Thanks Guillermo! a very clear "How-To" PeterB On Monday 10 February 2003 10:45 am, Guillermo Ballester Valor wrote:

Hi,

Because I spent a some hours trying to solve the problems about DVD-CD units when upgrade to SuSE 8.1, I think it could be a nice idea to write some lines about how I did it.

PROBLEM 1) We are unable to mount any DVD or CD. REASON: This is because SuSE 8.1 emulates IDE-ATAPI units as scsi. SOULTION: At SuSE database support there is described a solution

http://sdb.suse.de/en/sdb/html/81_ide-scsi.html

The bad side about that solution is we lost scsi emulation of CD or DVD units, and some burner programs needs this scsi emulation to be able to use it. So if we need these units scsi-emulated we have to go other way.

In this list I read a solution that works nice to me. These are the steps: a) be sure about what scsi device is assigned to our DVD (CD) driver, as root #) cdrecord -scanbus

We can get something like:

---------------------- Cdrecord 1.11a28 (i686-suse-linux) Copyright (C) 1995-2002 Jörg Schilling Linux sg driver version: 3.2.0 Using libscg version 'schily-0.6' scsibus0: 0,0,0 0) 'TOSHIBA ' 'DVD-ROM SD-M1612' '1004' Removable CD-ROM 0,1,0 1) 'AOPEN ' 'CD-RW CRW3248 ' '1.10' Removable CD-ROM 0,2,0 2) * 0,3,0 3) * 0,4,0 4) * 0,5,0 5) * 0,6,0 6) * 0,7,0 7) * -----------------------

This told me that my Toshiba DVD-ROM drive is in scsi 0, i.e. the device is '/dev/scd0'

Then, make a soft link to that device (as root):

#) rm /dev/dvd #) ln -s /dev/scd0 /dev/dvd

With that, we should be able to mount, read and work with our DVD. But still remains a problem ....

2) PROBLEM: The drive is too slow and we cannot see movies smoothly. REASON: This is because it has DMA mode disabled. SOLUTION:

We have to know what IDE unit is our DVD. We can enter

# grep DVD /var/log/boot.msg

and get

------------------------------ <4>hdb: TOSHIBA DVD-ROM SD-M1612, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive <4>hdc: AOPEN CD-RW CRW3248 1.10 20020301, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive <4> Vendor: TOSHIBA Model: DVD-ROM SD-M1612 Rev: 1004 <4> Vendor: TOSHIBA Model: DVD-ROM SD-M1612 Rev: 1004 <4> Vendor: TOSHIBA Model: DVD-ROM SD-M1612 Rev: 1004 <4> Vendor: TOSHIBA Model: DVD-ROM SD-M1612 Rev: 1004 <4> Vendor: TOSHIBA Model: DVD-ROM SD-M1612 Rev: 1004 <4> Vendor: TOSHIBA Model: DVD-ROM SD-M1612 Rev: 1004 <4> Vendor: TOSHIBA Model: DVD-ROM SD-M1612 Rev: 1004 --------------------------------

So, my DVD is at '/dev/hdb' . Now we have to set this drive to proper DMA mode. I get the correct DMA mode searching in BIOS default settings. I see my DVD unit set as UDMA mode 2 as default. Then I st this mode to the device

#) hdparm /dev/hdb -d1 -Xudma2

Note that -Xudma2 means UDMA mode 2, other hardware can have different values (see man hdparm).

After doing that I can see DVD movies with MPlayer as I did with SuSE 8.0.

And now a QUESTION: how to set the DMA mode at startup time.?

Hope this help to SuSE 8.1 users.

Guillermo.

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