Most Pentium based systems have two EIDE buses. Normally if you have one hard drive and one CDROM drive you'll have each as the master device on each bus. This would result in the devices /dev/hda and /dev/hdc.
This is optimal as the EIDE protocol only allows one device at a time to be active on each EIDE bus and CDROM I/O operations are very slow. If a second hard drive and / or CDROM are installed they should be configured each as slave devices on the bus with the other like device. They would then show up as /dev/hdb (EIDE channel 1) and /dev/hdd (EIDE channel 2). On the original topic - does it consistentely occur with only some CDs or any CD? Some CDROM drives / ATAPI drivers have problems reading some CDROMS, especially "extra capacity" (also known something like 700MB) CDs. Results can be very inconsistent between drives, drivers and CDs. If it *is* consistent and you're using the same ATAPI driver as you were using under Redhat (not sure how you'd check...) I'd guess the CDROM drive is going bad. Gary Balbir Thomas wrote: > Correct me if I am wrong . The CDROM is a slave to the primary IDE drive so I > would expect it would be hdb. > > sincerely > Balbir
