Fwd: CD/DVD drive problem

[Rashkae]

Winton Vandepeer wrote:
em-with-my-Laptop-Lenovo-3000-N200-in-Linux/m-p/11571
>> --
>> Steve
> Many thanks ,
> Been there, no solution,
> have even posted there , only answer there is
> "It must be a Ubuntu problem" seems to be a stock answer.
> The drive is the built in drive on the notebook, and has been replaced
> with a new one, same problem,
> the drive doesn't have any problems, (needs to exist to have problems
> :-)  ) just doesn't exist with dual boot. I only keep XP to test open
> source software ported to Windows for people I know who will only use
> Windows.
> guess I will just have to live with it, lesson to be learnt, no more Lenovo's.
> Thanks again
> Winton
> 

What is most interesting about this story is that the CD-ROM stops
working even in Windows.  It's therefore not a Ubuntu problem per say.
The only thing that Ubuntu does that would in any way affect Windows is
install Grub.  Grub must at some point be probing the ide/ata devices,
and whatever signal is being sent to the CD-ROM during that process
permanently disables it until the next hard boot.  Very shitty of Lenovo
not to investigate and fix this obvious defect, but at least the probe
is not causing the drive to erase it's ROM, effectively bricking the
device (hello Lite-On.)

But if you're interested in testing my wild theory, first you have to
install a dual boot system, then nuke GRUB from the MBR so it doesn't
load.  A windows fix boot process should be able to do that, or, booting
from a System Rescue CD, use the lilo -M /dev/sda command (to restore an
old style dos MBR.)  Use a partition editor to make your windows
partition the "Boot" partition in conjunction with the lilo -M command,
and Windows should be able to boot without grub (but effectively making
the Linux system unusable) and you should be able to verify that you
have a working CD-ROM with Windows and Linux installed.

But before doing that, here's another idea to test.  I've noticed that
new versions of Grub (ubuntu 9.04 and 9.10, but they use very different
versions of grub, respectively) use UUID numbers in their menu.lst (and
whatever that new file grub 2 uses) to find root devices.  (I'm
referring to the grub root device, not the Linux kernel root filesystem
parameter).  I would find it interesting, as a test, to see what happens
if those UUID references were instead replaced with hard drive reference
number.  Since the notebook probably only has 1 HD, that will always be
drive 0,partition.  Maybe if grub doesn't have to go looking for device
UUID's it won't probe the CD-ROM