Why a bad CD can kill my system? (and how to avoid it?)

sessionID

I've tried to mount a CD... The drive gave strange sounds, it could not 'spin' it up right.
A few seconds later the system halted (I mean there was no response to keyboard, mouse, not even to alt+sysrq+s/u/b. I have no other computer to try ssh...).

After 2 minutes of waiting I had to push the reset button

[20 days uptime gone

]

I know that my CDRW is quite lame (a cheap philips), but how and why can a bad CD kill the whole system?
Is there any way to avoid this?

I use gentoo kernel 2.4.19, scsi emulation is on, dma is enabled for that drive.
(BTW I had the same problem when I had suse 7.3 [a year ago] + a sony drive.)

BonezTheGoon · Posted: Thu Apr 24, 2003 2:24 pm Post subject:

Sounds (to me) like you are having Power Supply related issues. If your CDs are having trouble spinning up and then your system crashes it really sounds like your voltages are not quite up to snuff at all times, though obviously most of the time they are if you can have 20 days up time.

This is just my first guess given the information you have offered so far. I'd certainly look into it. Also there is a very good article about PSU requirements and such here.

Regards,
BonezTheGoon

sessionID · Posted: Thu Apr 24, 2003 2:30 pm Post subject:

Thanks, I'll read the article.

But this only happens with the new pack of Fujifilm CDs I bought. The TDK CDs don't have any problem...

I'll also think about this :roll:

BonezTheGoon · Posted: Thu Apr 24, 2003 3:40 pm Post subject:

Yeah that certainly sounds interesting. Either way I sure hope you get it sorted out!!

Regards,
BonezTheGoon

sessionID · Posted: Fri Apr 25, 2003 2:45 pm Post subject:

Well, I have scsi emu compiled in.
I've removed "hdc=ide-scsi" from grub.conf, and now the problem is gone :idea:

my source