[dunbar]

Ok, here is why I think a certain CDROM drive is still good: Linux boot images (vmlinuz, used on install CDs and with LILO until mid way through the boot process) access it perfectly first try, every try. Rescue disks are the same because they tend to use vmlinuz.

Here is why I think the drive is bad: First off, I replaced it with a different CDROM drive, all seems fine as of now. Second, back when the 'bad' CDROM was still installed, under certain conditions, I had to suffer 3 ATAPI resets before it would allow me to use it. Those conditions were: always need to perform 3x ATAPI reset on the very first access [after the machine was cold booted] or [warm rebooted]. This was not specific to one distro: I tried Slackware 8.0, Debian something and several RPM based distros (RH, MDK, and some others). All suffered the problem. DEVFS was used in some installs, not used in others. Third, sometimes during installations, the install would fail "package error , package foo not installed", but the very next install attempt fails elswhere, or possibly not even failing at all!

The puzzler to me is the fact that bootimages ever got flawless access first try....

Something is assumed differently between the 2 cases of IDE access (vmlinuz vs installed kernel), and the vmlinuz instance is the better choice, IMO. The asumption of a difference makes sense to my limited Linux knowledge, because the 2 kernels themselves are different (amongst other diferences): the modular kernel seems to be the post install / post boot choice; whereas I suspect that the vmlinuz kernel is using more elementary (read that as 'less assumptions').

Any ideas?