[ltp] Thinkpad 600 CDROM woes

[Martin Sanborn]

Perhaps someone can shed some light on my situation. My Thinkpad 600's CDROM
drive appears to be on the verge of an untimely death. Whether audio or data
CDs are inserted, most of the time the drive will spin up, sound like it is
reading the disc, then abruptly stop, flashing its little yellow LED every
second until the disc is removed. It will attempt this a few times, then
ultimately fail. If by chance it does read an audio disc, playback is choppy
and generally unlistenable. The kernel logs have messages like,

Nov  6 13:11:42 delirium kernel: hdc: packet command error: status=0x51 {
DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
Nov  6 13:11:42 delirium kernel: hdc: packet command error: error=0x30
Nov  6 13:11:42 delirium kernel: ATAPI device hdc:
Nov  6 13:11:42 delirium kernel:   Error: Medium error -- (Sense key=0x03)
Nov  6 13:11:42 delirium kernel:   (reserved error code) -- (asc=0x57,
ascq=0x00)
Nov  6 13:11:42 delirium kernel:   The failed "Test Unit Ready" packet
command was:
Nov  6 13:11:42 delirium kernel:   "00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 "
Nov  6 13:11:42 delirium kernel: cdrom: open failed.

Anyone with similar experience? There were some reports with a bug in the
kernel way back in the 2.2 series that may have caused some problems, but the
bugs have since been fixed and I doubt this is a software problem.

I know these drives are pretty cheap - $25 on ebay - but I wanted a second
opinon before I buy one.

I'm running kernel version 2.4.13 with the xfs patch and devfs. The machine
has 196 MB of RAM. Curiously, it passes the CDROM self-test in the IBM BIOS.

Thanks for any information.

Marty Sanborn

--

| Martin Sanborn - Dept. of Chemical Engineering - Northwestern University |
| m-sanborn@nwu.edu - (847)467-1653 - http://zeolites.cqe.nwu.edu/marty |

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