Strange Drive Read

[Rick Stevens]

brad.mugleston at comcast.net wrote:
> My machine is going nuts -going to a command line prompt (root) I
> see the following
> 
> hdh:ATAPI reset timedout, status=0X80 ide3: reset, success
> hdh: status timedout;status= 0X80 {busy}
> hdh:drive not ready for command
> scsi:aborting command timed out.....
> 
> over and over again

Drive /dev/hdh is dying or dead.  It's hanging up your IDE bus and
causing grief.

> Any idea?  I've rebooted and it starts doing it again.  My CD
> writer has a steady orange light on - I believe the drive is
> empty, I need to shut down and see if I can open it (there isn't
> a place to put a paper clip in to force an eject.

The orange light should tell you something.  My guess is that the select
logic on the drive went blooey (highly technical term).  It happens.

There must be a hole somewhere.  It should be near the margin of the
drawer or near the eject button.  I don't think I've seen a drive
without one (well, once way back on an Apple Lisa's floppy drive--and
then the holes on floppies or CDs with electric eject mechanisms became
somewhat mandatory as the Lisa had a penchant for eating floppies).
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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-            "You think that's tough?  Try herding cats!"            -
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