LG CD-ROMs Destroyed by Mandrake 9.2

An anonymous reader writes "The latest offering of Mandrake's distribution, 9.2, has been found to not only be incompatible with some LG CD-ROM drives, but to destroy them during the installation process. Mandrake have posted information on their errata page and further information can be found on this thread [google]. Along with over 350Mb of updates within a week of release, it's not been a good start for this latest release."

LG drives

[mrsev]

I know quite a few people who have had big problems with LG drives. I think that they are very unreliable anyway. Lots of people I know also have LG burners that mess up cds when burning. Stay away. Anybody else know people with faulty drives?

More Information

[heli0]

People started noting this a week ago:

9.2 FRIED my CDROM drives [mandrakeclub.com]

the culprit

[spoonist]

appears to be a kernel patch

I found this post [google.com].

Nobody really knows what the problem is at this point, but yes, it is the case that ANY hardware that can be put out of commission by software is at fault, morally. The latest from the cooker list is that the problem seems to affect LG cdroms (not burners, not dvds) with the model number CRD-84xx, and that it seems to have been triggered by a patch for packet-writing added to the 2.4.22-rc2q5 kernel on Aug 15.

What really happened as far as I understand it now

[Foske]

The kernel Mandrake uses enables a feature on CDROM drives. This kernel feature is officially not production stable yet, so other distro's don't use it YET. LG drives with buggy firmware die if this feature is enabled. LG doesn't support Linux, so this problem doesn't exist in their eyes.

Conclusion: It will happen to ANY distribution that uses kernels with this enabled. Mandrake unfortunately hit the trigger first in an attempt to have a slightly too cool kernel.

Problem on other distros too...

[AELinuxGuy]

I've had this exact problem with the Cool Linux CD: http://emergencycd2.sourceforge.net/ This article just confirms the problem. I was using a Dell OptiPlex GX1 and the system would just halt on boot. Then on reboot the drive was no longer detected. The drive would not even respond to an eject - I had to do it manually to get my CD back. Unfortunately, I assumed that a CD-ROM could not be damaged by software and that this drive just happened to fail as I was booting...so I tried it on another system! Now I've got two dead CD-ROM drives waiting to be returned to Dell. Now time to play stupid about why the drives failed to get an RMA!

Re:What about....

[Croaker]

Well, after RTFT, I came across this:

...But yes, it is LG's fault. The current news is that it was triggered by the

addition of packet-writing code to the 2.4.22-rc2q5 kernel on Aug. 15, no news on how that determination was made. One must suspect that querying the drive for the format of the disk or its capabilities somehow triggers a firmware self-destruct bug in the CRD-84xx models.

So, I guess if you tend to use bleeding edge kernels, beware. Mandrake sometime tosses in non-"Linus blessed" things, I believe, so this might have been something you'd only get if you went looking for it.

I've installed 9.2, and it's been a mess. The missing kernel source package in the download version ws a major pain in the ass. Since I'm a silver Mandrake Club member, I was able to get the PowerPack edition as a download as well, but that kept messing up when trying to install. The checksums all checked out, so I have no clue why I got the various problems I did. I've finally gotten it stable, and able to do a few things I haven't been able to get working in the past, like DVD viewing (no, not through the stock Mandrake stuff... only through additional non-Mandrake packages).

Sad to say, Mandrake messed up this release big time. It just wasn't soup yet. It's really too bad, since I've had pretty good luck with them in the past.

SuSE too.

[Anonymous Coward]

I had an old 48X LG-CDROM that got fried by SuSE 8.0. I also heard that my freind had his monitor destroyed by Debian (due to the buggy Xfree86 3.3.7.debian).

Re:LG drives

[ponzo]

I work in a retail store and we sell at least 100 LG burners and 150 LG cd-roms every week and we probably get 1 or 2 returns a month. I really can't say anything bad about them.

Re:Funny

[dissy]

> If Windows would do this to your drive there would be a public outcry. Here on
> /. it is more like "ah well, shit happens, it's mentioned in the errata so suck
> it up and get over it".

But windows could do this. All it would have to do is send one of the two normal APATI commands to this cdrom drive, and it will fry just the same.

LG stated the bug is in their cdrom drive, and one of two commands sent to it will execute the buggy routine in firmware, causing it to dump its firmware totally.
They cant be fixed because to flash firmware, you have to use a program that is in the firmware in the first place.

Re:Warranty

[Mashiki]

Already been done. "Back in the day", there were plenty of virus written that would throw your monitor out of sync, simply baking the tube.

Some others that whould smash the read/write heads of your HDD into the spindle destroying the drive, that's why it's controlled at the hardware level now. That was back when the heads actually required a seperate program to park them. That was alot of fun.

I'd say that Mandrake is responsable for the replacement of those drives.

Research next time?

[buchanmilne]

While it is nice that Slashdot posts this as a service to the community, it could have been an idea to at least try and get more facts before posting this.

Firstly, it seems to be only (or mostly) CD-ROM drives, and not CD-RW drives or CD/DVD drives, however Mandrakesoft is compiling a list of the affected model numbers.

Secondly, not all drives of the same model number are affected, since some drives of the same model, but with differing firmware revisions, have different results.

Thirdly, this is a hardware/firmware defect, which seems to be triggered by the packet writing patch (I believe SuSE has shipped with this patch for some time, so LG drives could be affected under SuSE). If your drive is still under warranty, LG should replace it.

It may also be possible to reflash the drives with a working firmware, but no-one has reported success with that yet.

Instead of posting a link to alt.os.linux.mandrake, maybe next time Slashdot can link to the thread on the cooker mailing list which has been posted to by the Mandrakesoft people investigating the issue? But I guess that's too much to ask of Slashdot.

Re:What about....

[mrsev]

I bit off topic but with mandrake use the packages from the Penguin Liberation Front at http://plf.zarb.org/

They are by far the best thing for mandrake. TO quote their site "....(PLF)..is a repository of RPMs that cannot be included into the Mandrake distro for legal reasons (copyright/license/patent)."

THe list of things they have is just huge. From stuff like kmplayer (KDE mplayer plugin) to unrar for decompression.

Warning though most packages are illegal in the USA, and you dont want to be naughty!!!

Enjoy

Re:If you're a hardware manufacturer...

[Ianoo]

Not true. Modern multisync monitors simply will not display vert/horiz frequencies that would damage them. The last monitors that could be burned out simply by setting the wrong refresh rate went out with the dinosaurs, and good riddance too!

Re:Ouch.

[harlows_monkeys]

I haven't had software destroy hardware since a Commodore PET

Windows 95 was able to destroy certain early Athlon motherboards, by erasing the BIOS. This happened during the hardware detect, and so of course you didn't get very far when it got to the point where it was time to reboot!

Re:Well...

[ageforce_]

i'm not sure, but this could be the thread in question:
google [google.com]

Re:MOD THIS UP!!! I'M FEELING INSIGHTFUL.

[flink]

My MB does. Many Gibgabyte boards have a dual bios feature. And yes, it does have a restore factory defaults option.

Re:To LG

[Anonymous Coward]

Modern monitors do have hardware failsafes now, and also have some provisions for software (DDC) failsafes as well. However, Windows(9X/2000/XP) is the only OS I know of that flat out refuses to allow you to change to unsupported resolutions if the PnP monitor is working correctly. Ok there is a way around that in windows too, but you need to muck around with the monitor drivers first.

Apparently already fixed by LG...

[leonbrooks]

...but they should have advised the users of certain models of their drives to check and possibly update the drive firmware.

The thing which kills the drives is - wait for it - setting them up for packet writing. The hackers who made the patch to do this (included starting with Mandrake 9.2rc1) may be able to figure out a way to do it without triggering LG's bug, or may not, in which case any Linux kernel which features this packet writing code will kill a broken LG drive.

Note that this happens when the drive is init'ed, not when you write a CD with one, so you'll kill a drive just as effectively even if you install over the network or whatever.

As to responsibility, well... the drive software is broken, end of story. If your LG drive dies, take it back and make a warranty claim.

For those who assert that Mandrake should have tested 9.2 on every known drive before releasing it, the answer is that Mandrake did indeed test 9.2 on these models of LG drives, but none of their testers happened to have the broken firmware revision(s). <shrug>

For those speculating about what would happen if it had been MS-Windows-XP's problem instead, the only differences would have been that more than 80% of all broken LG drives would have been killed by now due to semi-forced upgrades, Penguinistas would have been gleefully rejoicing that their software didn't kill drives, and Microsoft would still be ignoring the problem and we'd expect them to for at least another two weeks.

I don't know whether it's possible to flash a killed drive's firmware and resurrect it, or whether the broken firmware actually destroys hardware.

hardly surprising in my experience

[timek]

That there's such a showstopper of a bug in a recent mandrake release comes as no surprise.

I'm not a linux expert but I do like fiddling around with it. And I'm not afraid of using a CLI. I find with a few minor exceptions Linux meets my needs as a desktop user -- student/home user. KDE + Mozilla + OpenOffice and XMMS. Everything else is just nice.

Mandrake 8.1 was the first distribution that would boot on my computer out of the box. Or rather after burning the downloaded ISO's. I had good experiences with 8.1, 8.2 & 9.0.

Mandrake 9.1 got to be so annoying that I switched to Suse 8.2

Mandrake 9.1 had annoying flaws in the ADSL scripts. Everything was ok in 9.0. I thought the problem would surely be fixed in the 9.2 betas and RC's. But, no. I had to copy and manually edit even after using Mandrake Control Center. The error was something like "n=eth0 (using >Name of the NIC module
In addition there were errors error in the fstab. So that there were always odd errors in mounting my cdrom & floppy. Again the result of carelessness and sloppiness.

All of the above can be found in a search of ALT.OS.LINUX.MANDRAKE on google groups.

Re:Apparently already fixed by LG...

[Dahan]

The thing which kills the drives is - wait for it - setting them up for packet writing.

Why would you want to set up a CD-ROM drive for packet writing. CD-ROM drives can't write--that's why they're called CD-ROMs and not CD-Rs or CD-RWs.

The hackers who made the patch to do this (included starting with Mandrake 9.2rc1) may be able to figure out a way to do it without triggering LG's bug

I got an idea... how about don't try to enable packet writing on a CD-ROM drive!

Re:It happened to Apple

[canajin56]

In that case, however, it didn't damage the hardware...it crashed the OS. And then when it was rebooting, it reads from the CD drive and crashes again...and you can't eject the CD manually, because on Macs no removable media can be ejected manually. There isn't even a pinhole. Stupid design, but nothing is ruined, if you know what you are doing. (You can eject from open firmware)

Re:On the updates . . .

[canajin56]

It isn't overspinning them. It is sending a standard flush-cache command to the drive. It was recently added to the kernel. Windows doesn't use it, either. LG didn't implement it properly. It crashes the firmware. And you can't reflash the firmware because the flashing is done by a program IN the firmware :O

The packet writing itself doesn't kill them

[leonbrooks]

A flush command which happens while deciding whether they're a writer or not has been redefined (<thwack!>) by LG to mean "upload firmware" (with predictable results). To quote Juan Quintela from the Cooker list, "Yep, whoeved decided at LG that reusing for UPLOAD_FIRMWARE command FLUSH_CACHE comand should be shoot. Twice."

Re:It happened to Apple

[Jimithing DMB]

Or you could just hold down the mouse button or the eject key on the keyboard while it was starting up. Simply press and hold one of those as soon as you hear the startup chime and any CD in the drive will be ejected.

In fact, a quick call to 1-800-MY-APPLE would have resulted in the above answer.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Bad luck

[Rick Zeman]

I am not the only computer user at home, so I can't nix Windows. I installed Mandrake 9.1 on my brand new computer, and Lilo corrupted the MBR so bad that it didn't even load - it just showed a sequence of 9s. I had to boot from a floppy and do a fdisk /mbr to restore the MBR, what put me back on a Windows-only enviroment. I have installed several times Red Hat and Conectiva, and this sort of thing had never happened to me. I am going to submit a bug to Mandrake and go back to Red Hat 8.

I had that happen to me, too. I just booted the CD again and told it to repair the boot loader. It did, and Mandrake has been great ever since. WAYYY more elegant (also way newer) than the Caldera 3.1 it replaced.

Re:How this ends

[Reziac]

Stifling my embarrassment at doing even worse than RTFA, I went off and read the entire 6 pages of comments at MandrakeClub forum that someone here linked to. Seems the fried drive problem occurs on several models with firmware v1.00 but not with v1.01. So LG may be aware of the problem, and it's likely worth your while to check with LG for a firmware update. Also, someone mentioned that the trigger is in one particular module that any disty could have used, but Mandrake was just the unlucky first. Kinda like a "-1, first post" moderation. ;)

Re:It happened to Apple

[Karma Sink]

Nicely done, but completely incorrect.

Go look at any iMac, tray-loading or slot-loading, since that's what you're referring to (this problem was with the G3 iMac, not the G4). There is an eject pin on the far right side of the slot-load, and slightly down and to the right of the open button on the tray-loader. Both should be opened with a paper clip.

Neither of them worked with the RIAA CDs. The computer had to be disassembled by a Mac Technician (which I was when this was an issue), and the CD had to be removed physically. Even then, the drives didn't always work when you put them back together.

Not trying to be a dick, just letting you know the truth. :)

Re:Well...

[zcat_NZ]

But the Outlook worm designed to do this isn't scheduled until next week. There's no way to move it up, there are too many other releases in the pipeline.

It was quite a long time between flashable BIOSes and this [cert.org] getting released.

I think Murphy's Law (the original form) applies here; if you design hardware that can be destroyed[1] in software, someone will figure out how to incorporate that into a virus.

[1] Many people have nitpicked that reflashing a BIOS isn't actually destroying hardware. Technically perhaps it isn't, but in the case of surface-mounted BIOSes it's not practical to reflash/repair the BIOS. If the cheapest repair option is buying a new motherboard, I consider the old one effectively 'destroyed'.