[rescue] Bad luck with SCSI cdrom drives

[Patrick Finnegan]

On Thursday 06 September 2007, Jonathan Groll wrote:
> I now own 5 SCSI CDROM drives, and only have one Toshiba drive that
> actually works in all of my sun gear. Granted, all of these drives
> have been bought second hand with machines that are typical rescue
> machines, and some of these drives will work up until a point until
> the sense errors start to occur (Yes, SCSI ID and block size has been
> set correctly), but I fear I must come to the conclusion that the
> technology is simply poorly designed, or that older drives struggle
> to read modern CDR media. Perhaps I must learn to ignore all the old
> warning labels and open some drives up to see if I can clean lenses
> etc. Luckily, most machines will netboot fine, and the only real
> problem child I have is freebsd which I haven't managed to
> successfully netinstall.

My first suggestion is to burn the disks at a slower speed, especially 
if you're using a "newer" high-speed drive.  Low speed drives can't 
always read disks written at high writing speeds reliably.  Try 
somewhere around 4x or 8x.

Pat
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