https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=237164 rmuncrief@comcast.net changed: What |Removed |Added ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- CC| |rmuncrief@comcast.net Status|NEEDINFO |ASSIGNED Info Provider|rmuncrief@comcast.net | ------- Comment #16 from rmuncrief@comcast.net 2007-02-02 15:04 MST ------- Hi, I'm sorry it has taken me so long to reply, but changing cable types caused all hell to break loose under XP and it took awhile to characterize the problem, at least as best I could without an oscilloscope, logic analyzer, or spectrum analyzer. To summarize, the LITE-ON drive was installed with the cable it came with, a 40c cable, and it was rock solid under XP. When I changed it to an 80c cable XP set the drive to Ultra DMA mode 4 (UDMA66) but the drive became poly-unstable. It could only intermittently read DVD/CDs. I was eventually able to make it work but it appears the drive is shipped with a 40c cable for a reason, it is highly susceptible to noise if you use an 80c cable and it operates in UDMA66 mode. The Sony drive is using a 40c cable, and changing it to an 80c cable had no effect on it. By the way, XP places the Sony drive in PIO mode no matter what the cable, while openSuse places it in UDMA33. In any case, the Sony drive works fine under both operating systems. I didn't use the "hdparm -X udma2 /dev/hda" command you suggested but had manually set the DMA mode to UDMA33 via Yast when I was using the DVD with the 40c cable and it did fix the problem. I believe the command you suggested does the same thing. In the end I got the DVD drive to work at UDMA66 by placing the Sony drive as a slave on the same IDE cable as the DVD drive and removing the secondary IDE cable. This seemed to eliminate enough noise to allow the DVD drive to work at top speed. Keep in mind this is a very short summary, you just can't imagine (or maybe you can) all the different data and power routing solutions I tried, or how many different cables of all different types I tried. The bottom line is that it appears some ODD manufacturers will sell products whose hardware may report an operating speed that it's not actually capable of operating at. At least the operating speed may vary depending upon the noise of its environment, which is typically pretty bad in a PC cabinet. I believe your plan to adjust to the actual tested operating speed is the only reliable solution. And by the way, I took the plunge. I converted all of my data to ext3 and am using Suse 10.2 as my primary OS. Only 20GB of my 200GB of hard drive space is now formatted as NTFS, and I'm using a translator program to access the ext3 partitions from Windows XP when I need to. I have installed VMWare Workstation and am now running three separate Windows XP systems under openSuse to develop my three web sites. I'm still not completely happy with openSuse, and am having a lot of problems getting anyone to truly care or do anything about the multimedia problems, but I'm giving openSuse the best chance I can, and will do everything I can to stick with it and make it work. However, if I'm still struggling a month or so from now I will have to go out and buy Vista. I'm losing a lot of development time trying to get openSuse to perform basic desktop OS tasks. On the other hand, maybe it will work out and I can finally actually purchase a fully functional version of Linux!. That will be a great day!. -- Configure bugmail: https://bugzilla.novell.com/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are on the CC list for the bug, or are watching someone who is.