Re: How do I know if my CD writer is dying.
- From: cga2000 <cga2000@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2007 23:05:32 GMT
On Tue, 30 Oct 2007 01:44:36 GMT, Dances With Crows <danSPANceswithTRAPcrows@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
cga2000 staggered into the Black Sun and said:
my sole means of backup, an HP M820 external CD writer (SCSI/pcmcia)
no longer works as reliably as it used to. The wodim cdrecord
replacement hangs just before it says "fixating" .. and eventually
barfs a million error messages
Install cdrecord (or growisofs) and try that, just to make sure it's not
a hardware problem. Joerg keeps saying wodim has bugs. He might
have a point there.
I was going to try that.. after I remembered some rather heated
exchanges between Joerg and the debian-user crowd.
But actually, since I don't believe in magic, it turns out that I had
upgraded by installing debian etch on different partitions and kept my
old sarge handy just in case. So I rebooted my old sarge system where
the HP M820 worked w/o problems and tried to write the same iso file I
was trying to write via wodim to a CD-R with the old cderecord from 2-3
year ago and got exactly the same result.
Now I know that this used to work and I can't thing of anything that
might have changed on this old system.
So after running this test, I thought I wouldn't bother installing
Joerg's version. Although, come to think of it, I might get better
support from him than I did on the debian lists.
I have a feeling this has nothing to do with pcmcia or scsi
configuration, or a bug in wodim that would affect just my particular
hardware, but [is] a symptom of this 5-year old device gently dying.
Is there any way I could confirm this before I replace it?
See above, and take a look at dmesg's output. You *might* see
sensible error messages if this is an actual SCSI device
It definitely is. I get all the scsi messages and sense codes .. but
when the problem occurs all I get is a hang and /var/log/messages has
this:
Oct 28 22:09:59 turki kernel: [ 703.061864] sr 1:0:4:0: scsi: Device
offlined - not ready after error recovery
Oct 28 22:10:01 turki kernel: [ 704.834626] wodim[5560]: segfault at
bf56efdc eip b7e305b9 esp bf56efb8 error 6
If I have the time next weekend, maybe I should look for a scsi manual
with all the sense codes.
and you have verbose SCSI error reporting turned on.
I'll read the man page and see how I can activate more verbose
messaging.
If it's IDE or USB, the odds of sensible error messages go down, but
you might see something useful in the dump.
Do CD writers just die and [then] you have to buy another one, or
[are] there ways to give them a second life?
This depends on what exactly has failed.
I'd bet on the "laser" .. i.e. I was experiencing problems with it over
the last month or so .. and eventually was able to write a
mountable/usable copy of the latest xubuntu by blowing canned air and
(later) applying rubbing alcohol at
what looks to be the "lens".
But this is pure speculation .. what kinda bothers me is that I would
have expected this type of component to just die and never come back.
Here, I get the OPC message .. fine .. then wodim/cdrecord write for
quite a while -- I think something like 750KB/s or thereabout .. and
I'm looking at over 500MB .. fine again .. everything appear to be
working ..
And it's right at the end .. when it should perform the "fixating" part
of the operation that it borks. Makes me think of a surgeon having
successfully performed his 7th appendectomy of the day suddenly dying of
a massive heart attack just when he's about to sew his patient back up.
Certain problems can apparently be fixed by fiddling with the laser
power level,
The device appears to get his power off of his own little P.U.
connected to the same outlet as the laptop. And power seems to be
pretty stable in my area.
but problems with the mechanical parts
It does appear to be noisier than it used to be. Like it's humming when
it comes up while booting. But then you get used to these things anyway
... so I'm not even sure.
typically mean it's time to replace the drive.
I have seen some bare drives that supposedly are compatible with this
old laptop -- IDE .. better than this pcmcia/scsi contraption, perhaps?
The trouble is that I would need a caddy to plug them into the laptop
and these appear to be rather hard to find.
The last CD-RW drive that died on me (2.5 years after the warranty
expired, much longer than any other CD-RW I'd owned, yay Plextor)
displayed complete and total catatonia. YDriveMV.
A sensible solution would probably be to setup a desktop/server
machine with a DVD writer (the ~700MB limitation is quite a pain when
your partitions are some 3-4GB)and have it backup the laptop remotely.
Considering I paid something like $300.00 for this HP M820 5-6 years
ago and that scsi over pcmcia strikes me as rather complicated I have a
feeling it may not be worth investigating further.
Thanks much for your comments.
cga
.
- References:
- How do I know if my CD writer is dying.
- From: cga2000
- Re: How do I know if my CD writer is dying.
- From: Dances With Crows
- How do I know if my CD writer is dying.
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