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CD-ROM breakdown?

Sunday 27 February 2005 om 23u12

So, I finally decided to get rid of Windows and to get Ubuntu, and now the crap begins.
I bought a brand new Maxtor 200 gig IDE drive and plugged it in, everything worked fine. Now it seems like there is a problem with either my primary IDE channel or with my CD-ROM-drive (an LG 12x burner for the record), it takes ages to get past the bios-screen and to get booting. I suspect my LG is the troublemaker, mostly because a few weeks ago this was my configuration:

• Primary IDE
  • Master: harddisk 40 gig 5400 rpm
  • Slave: none
• Secondary IDE
  • Master: harddisk 60 gig 7200 rpm
  • Slave: LG 12x CD-Writer

My secondary IDE port was forced to run in PIO mode, there is this “feature” in Windows XP that most people think of as a bug, and this is the description (found on this site:

PIO mode is enabled by default in the following situations:
…
For repeated DMA errors. Windows XP will turn off DMA mode for a device after encountering certain errors during data transfer operations. If more that six DMA transfer timeouts occur, Windows will turn off DMA and use only PIO mode on that device.

In this case, the user cannot turn on DMA for this device. The only option for the user who wants to enable DMA mode is to uninstall and reinstall the device.

Windows XP downgrades the Ultra DMA transfer mode after receiving more than six CRC errors. Whenever possible, the operating system will step down one UDMA mode at a time (from UDMA mode 4 to UDMA mode 3, and so on).
…

Long story short, insert a scratched CD and the whole channel get reverted to PIO, and there’s nothing you can do about it. I tried ti hack my way around it, but it looked like there were too much IO-errors to make it work in DMA-mode.

Now, with my brand new 200 gig maxtor, this is my new setup:

• Primary IDE
  • Master: harddisk 40 gig 5400 rpm
  • Slave: LG 12x CD-Writer
• Secondary IDE
  • Master: harddisk 200 gig 7200 rpm
  • Slave: harddisk 60 gig 7200 rpm

If I don’t attach the CD-ROM (and make all possible combinations with the HD’s) everything works fine. When I DO plug in the CD-ROM, it takes about a whole minut to get past the bios-screen, and Grub loading takes ages, I mean, it takes over a minute (without the CD-ROM it takes not even a second). This leaves me with 2 possibilities, either there is something wrong with my primary IDE-channel, or the CD-ROM is bitching. Seen the PIO story I had with XP, it seems to me LG needs to get thrown out of the window (as G8KeePeR suggested).

Believe it or not, I am installing Ubuntu as we speak… USING THE LG CD-ROM-drive!

It gets me so confused…

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