[rescue] Bad luck with SCSI cdrom drives

[Ahmed Ewing]

On 9/6/07, Patrick Finnegan <pat at computer-refuge.org> wrote:
> On Thursday 06 September 2007, Jonathan Groll wrote:
> > 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.
>
> My first suggestion is to burn the disks at a slower speed, especially
> if you're using a "newer" high-speed drive.  Low speed drives can't
> always read disks written at high writing speeds reliably.  Try
> somewhere around 4x or 8x.

I second this suggestion. I've found that the single biggest
determining factor in getting my Solaris ISOs to work consistently is
the speed at which I burn the CDs. These days I don't even bother
going above 4x--even 8x wasn't liked by the factory CD-ROM drive in a
UE5000.

Hope that helps,

-A