On Sun, Aug 10, 2003 at 11:58:45PM -0400, Carl Fink wrote: > On Mon, Aug 11, 2003 at 01:42:16AM +0100, Pigeon wrote: > > > Might be wrong here, but I think it is timing out, and immediately > > being called again. Or is it now not working, but no longer putting > > out any messages? > > It is now not working, but no longer putting out any messages. > > > Does it do it with all CDs? > > It has never done it before, and I can't check without shutting down, > which I've been trying to avoid doing.
Oh dear. That combination is what happened to my drive that crapped out half way through reading a CD and never worked again. > > I believe that if the kernel module has hung avidemux may never get > > control back (someone please correct me if I'm wrong here), and a > > drive fault may cause such a hang. > > I'm sure that's the case, but again I think that's a bug. Errors > from a CD drive are not so rare that they should result in unkillable > processes, permanently locked drives, and permanently raised loads. > Eventually the driver should return an error and give control back to > the calling process. And again, I'd like advice on which package to > report the bug in. Well, it's pretty hard to design software that will exit gracefully when the hardware stops doing what it's supposed to do. If I'm right in the above quote and about the drive dying, I'd guess that makes it a kernel issue. > > There should be a little hole somewhere on the front panel of your > > CD-ROM. > > But there isn't How dead and chewed. > > - Dirty lens on the pickup head. If you have one of those CDs with > > tufts of carbon fibre glued to it, it's best used as a frisbee. The > > only way to clean the lens is to take the drive apart and wet-clean > > the lens with IPA. Drives are usually designed to place several > > pointless obstacles in the way of performing this most common of > > servicing tasks. (Hint to CD-ROM manufacturers: The lid is supposed > > to come off the top of a box, not the bottom.) > > I take those "don't fool with the laser" warnings seriously It's true that you have to clean them with an extremely delicate touch; as far as eye-damage is concerned, they're a non-problem. The beam is focussed to a point a few millimetres above the lens, and beyond there diverges again. By the time it reaches your eye that milliwatt of laser energy is spread over several square centimetres. If you don't stick your eye right into the thing, you'll be OK. > plus a replacement drive will cost under $20. Never buy a new one if the old one can be fixed... Repair, recycle and reduce consumption. -- Pigeon Be kind to pigeons Get my GPG key here: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x21C61F7F
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