Hi all,
I've run into a fairly intractable (for me) problem, and was wondering
if anybody could give me pointers on how to deal with it.
I am running Debian Woody on a Pentium III IDE based system.
I have a Ricoh 7083a ide cd rewriter, which I use using cdrecord and the
scsi over ide kernel modules.  I was running kernel 2.4.18 until
probably last weekend when I noticed 2.4.19 was out.  Downloaded patch
and installed new kernel with no real problems.  This morning I went to
burn a CDROM, and the system locked hard.  Rebooting into 2.4.18 allowed
cdburning to work fine.
This problem is very reproducible (on my system at least).
the cdrecord command I was using was
cdrecord -v speed=4 blank=fast dev=0,1,0 -data bak.iso
The blanking appears to go ok, but when it tries to write data, it just
locks up the entire system (can't ping it from outside even).  AFAICS,
the system just stops.  Hard reset is only way back in, and when it does
reboot, I cannot see anything useful in any logfiles (/var/log/messages
/var/log/kern.log /var/log/syslog, at any rate).
cdrecord -scanbus works fine and reports the two pseudo-scsi devices (my
cdr drive and my cdrw).
The same lock occurs even if there is no blanking.
I tried upgrading to 2.4.20-pre1-ac1 (on assumption that if there was a
kernel issue it might have been fixed in these patches), but it gives
the same error.  I also downloaded and compiled the source for
cdrecord 1.1.10, and installed it instead of the debian package (i was
wondering if maybe there was some compile option the packager had used
which maybe would cause the problem), and still the problem persisted.
Anyway, I'm completely stumped.  Google searching has not done me much
good, and I'm a little bit lost.  What I'd like to know is
a)  How to fix the problem ;-)
b)  Is this likely to be an application or kernel problem?  The severity
of the crash would make me suspect it is a kernel problem, but I'm
not very knowledgeable on these things.
c)  Should I post a description of this to the kernel mailing list? If
this is an appropriate course of action, are there any tips (beyond
the guidelines on kernel.org)?
Like I said, I'm lost on this one, so any info is very gratefully
received.
mick
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