[wplug] Mandrake 9.2 and LG writable opticals

[Bill Moran]

Vanco, Don wrote:
>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: John Harrold [mailto:jmh17 at pitt.edu] 
>>Sent: Monday, October 27, 2003 9:05 AM
>>To: wplug at wplug.org
>>Subject: Re: [wplug] Mandrake 9.2 and LG writable opticals
>>
>>
>>Sometime in October Vanco, Don assaulted the keyboard and produced:
>>
>>| I mentioned this as part of another post, thought it worthy 
>>of passing on
>>| for any of those that are contemplating Mandrake 9.2 and 
>>have writable LG
>>| optical drives.
>>| http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/errata.php3#badlg
>>
>>this is really weird. i remember back in the day, xwindows 
>>would screw up
>>monitors if the wrong refresh rate was used. 
> 
> 	Ah yes - the "good old days" - I remember purposely roasting a few
> mono terminals this way...

I just wanted to chime in because this is interesting.

Of course, because of the nature of a CD-ROM, it's possible that certain
commands (valid or invalid) could cause physical damage to the unit,
such as trying to position the laser at a track outside the range of its
allowed motion (like moving it to track -4000000 or something).

If this is the case, it's (in my opinion) a bug in both the CD controller
code in Mandrake, as well as the drive itself.  Obviously, the Mandrake
code should not tell the CD to do something that could damage it, but
neither should the CD actually attempt such an action.  As you point out,
Don, this hasn't been the way since the OLD monitors could be fried by
an improper mhz setting.  Any modern monitor I've seen will detect a
frequency out of range, and display a message (or at least refuse to
switch to a mode that will burn it out) and I think it should be
expected of any modern piece of hardware not to execute commands that
can cause damage.  Even a bug-free OS is capable of errors that could
cause it to temporarily send invalid commands.  You wouldn't expect that
a transient RAM failure could fry you floppy, CD, and HDD in one shot,
would you?

Not that it will help the poor souls who have fried CD-ROMs in the process
of finding this out, but it tells me not to purchase equipment from LG
Electronics.

-- 
Bill Moran
Potential Technologies
http://www.potentialtech.com