About a month ago, I raged about how much joy I was having trying to replace my desktop installation. Part of that process was a flaky CD Drive that would not burn a bootable CD, and had general problems. So I picked up a replacement drive this past weekend and fell down the rabbit hole of troubleshooting bliss.
The new drive is a Samsung TSSTcorp CDDVDW SH-S223C. Once installed I ran into a number of issues with K3B that resulted pretty much in removing that package, and all the related packages - such as WODIM (aka cdrecord). I then re-installed these packages and was able to get further through my trials, but alas, they were not over yet.
At this point, I kept getting write errors very shortly after the burning process started. (and of course, just far enough along to make the disk useless.) Further investigation of the error suggested a buffer under run caused by a hardware error. Yep, apparently the brand new drive was faulty.
BUT, I thought it was suspicious that not one, but two drives would exhibit problems. I've seen this sort of thing before and while it *could* be just two faulty devices, the odds of this are rather slim. So I dug deeper.
"Self", I said.. "Self, what is similar between these two drives when trying to burn a CD?"... I pondered for a moment or two, and replied "Well self, I think the operating system has been the same or similar distributions when the problems were being exhibited.". So I decided to test this theory.
I dug out the laptop, downloaded the latest copy of Fedora 12 and Ubuntu 9.10, burned the Ubuntu image, grabbed a spare drive off my stack, and set up to install a fresh Ubuntu desktop first. Once this was done, I copied the Fedora 12 image to the new desktop instal via a USB stick, and tried to burn it to CD. Fail.
Ok, at this stage it looks very much like Ubuntu *may* have a problem with the drive. Let's try a different distro just to be sure. Back to the laptop, burned the Fedora image to CD, then installed that to the desktop computer (after carefully making sure my primary drive was still not connected). Ok, install done. Copied the ISO image for Fedora to the desktop again, and tried to burn that to a new CD. Fail.
Looks like I'm returning the drive I thought. But then, just to be sure, I considered carefully if there was any other common elements involved. Hmm.. could it possibly be the hardware I'm connecting to? Could the motherboard be at fault here?
I have one of the newer motherboards that has 6 SATA II connectors built onto it. I decided to try a different SATA port for the CD drive to see if that would make a difference. Booted up Fedora again, and tried to burn one last time. I was thinking this was really stretching things, but what the hell.
Success.
Sooooo, it looks like the SATA port is flaky, and not the CD drive. If I could boot into the original drive/Kubuntu installation and burn a disk from there, with the CD plugged into this other port, that would confirm my hypothosis wouldn't it?
Well, whatdoyaknow?!!? It worked. So, I'm now back to where I started. But with a functional CD burner (for now).
It looks like Grover's Law came calling on me once again. Now, I just need to test the original CD drive and see if IT is faulty, though I suspect not. Spare parts are a good thing though.
Oh, and I need to figure out what to do with a handful of Fedora 12 Live CDs... But at least I can get back to work now.