[rescue] Bad luck with SCSI cdrom drives

[Jonathan Groll]

I now own 5 SCSI CDROM drives, and only have one Toshiba drive that
actually works in all of my sun gear. Granted, all of these drives have
been bought second hand with machines that are typical rescue machines,
and some of these drives will work up until a point until the sense
errors start to occur (Yes, SCSI ID and block size has been set
correctly), but I fear I must come to the conclusion that the technology
is simply poorly designed, or that older drives struggle to read modern
CDR media. Perhaps I must learn to ignore all the old warning labels and
open some drives up to see if I can clean lenses etc. Luckily, most
machines will netboot fine, and the only real problem child I have is
freebsd which I haven't managed to successfully netinstall.

I would like to know if my experience of one out of five working drives
is atypical for this list?

Cheers,
Jonathan.