[rescue] cdrom woes again...

[Ryan Thoryk]

This is pertaining to a series of messages I posted a while ago about SCSI
cdrom problems on Sun machines.

I've currently narrowed the problem down to around as far as I can go, and
here's a quick summary:

I've got an Sun Ultra 2 that I recently replaced it's old cdrom with a much
newer Yamaha 8x8x24 cdrw drive (model CRW8824S). It used to have a Toshiba
XM-5401B that was pulled from an old huge Dell Poweredge server (a monsterous
dual pentium 100 box).  I've been trying to get both of these drives to work
normally on this Sun machine and an older one (a sparc5/170), but with
problems.  It's getting frustrating especially that the new drive is a cdrw,
and it's screwing up some cds from this problem. I originally thought the old
drive was bad, but thought wrong.

The problem is basically a series of read errors and hardware errors that
occur when only reading and writing CDR discs (and cdrw discs).  Both of my
Solaris 8 and 9 install cds have to be booted around 2 to 3 times before the
install starts actually working.  Both of my netbsd cds (sparc32 and sparc64)
have problems, but at least are more reliable.  A typical incident would be
when I insert a cd, and then the drive would click around a lot, as if the cds
bad, even though it's fine.  At random times read errors would pop up, and
sometimes cds that are burning would either fail before or after the data copy
(during the first init, or the fixation).

Here's what I've checked:
cd types affected: only cdr or cdrw media (cds work flawlessly on other machines)
-both drives checked on both machines, with same results (both drives are
50-pin scsi)
-ultra2 has latest prom update
-multiple scsi cables tested
-multiple termination settings tested
-hard drives placed onto the scsi buses, work fine
-block size jumper on yamaha drive tested at both settings
-a 512-byte block CD created, still has problems
-vold not issue
-cdrecord complains a lot (also latest scg driver installed, for sol9)
-parity jumpers tested
-cd size (650 vs 700mb) not an issue

This is the weirdest thing...
any suggestions?

Ryan Thoryk
Unix and Network Specialist
ryan at tliquest.net