On Sat, 22 Sep 2001 21:16:02 +0100 (BST), Adam Bower wrote:
hdc: WEARNES RUBY CD-ROM, ATAPI CDROM drive
(....) Is that there appears to be problems with Wearnes CD-Rom drives in Gateway computers and they replaced the drives with Toshiba units as they did not ship Wearnes due to multiple replacement issues. Is your machine one made by Gateway by any chance? If not it may be that the Wearnes drive is not very good or something related.
No - it has a label on the front saying 'Bull' - I was beginning to think that I couldn't agree more....
However, there's progress: I couldn't understand why neither the 2X Wearnes or the 12X Liteon would work with Debian, although they'd both previously installed Redhat 7 without any difficulty. Suddenly (I'm very slow at these things!) it came to me that Redhat uses kernel 2.4, but the troublesome Debian (and Slack with the 12X drive) both use kernel 2.2. I remembered having seen something on the Slackware 8 disks that suggested that the 2.4.5 kernel could be installed if needed. In sheer desperation, I tried making a 2.4.5 bare.i boot disk this morning. Amazingly, Slack 8 installed on the 12X CD drive without a murmur. I did it twice, just to make sure.
So it seems as though there's an issue with kernel 2.2 and BOTH of my IDE CD drives, whereas kernel 2.4 and 2.0 (Slack 3.5) apparently have no trouble with those drives. Could this be the case?
Anyway - one lives and learns. I wonder what my next hurdle will be....
Gerald.