A while back I 'rescued' an old P5-133 w/ 16MB of RAM to be a firewall machine. The original CDROM didn't work, so I replaced it w/ another, and replaced the HD w/ a WD 3.2GB HD. Everything seemed to work ok for a while, but then the CD started acting up, i.e. whenever I inserted a disk, it would sit there blinking non-stop, unable to access the CD. I robbed a CD drive out of another machine, same thing?!!? Played musical chairs w/ the drives on the ide cables, the whole nine yards. Nothing helped. Suddenly, the HD started 'clunking' ominously. Went and got a 'new' 1.2GB HD from the local computer shack for about $10-15, and magically everything worked perfectly. Played around w/ it for a while, messed w/ RH 6.2 on the system. Now trying Debian 2.2r2 on it, and it worked ok, other than it took literally a day or so for it to crunch it's way thru the secondary install. Ended up rebooting and installing the packages from dselect. But, again, one CD wouldn't be recognized. It was an extra, so I wasn't too worried.
Now I'm to the point where ~50% of my CD's aren't recognized in the drive, regardless of whether they are Debian install CD's, RedHat, CDRW's, music CD's, whatever. Anyone w/ a good idea of WTF is going on her please let me know. I'm at the end of my rope on this one. This box is about one hop from the trash dumpster if it doesn't get fixed soon. I've already expended far more in time/effort/material than what the stupid thing is worth. Right now the only thing keeping me working on it is a grudge match sort of thing ;) TIA, Monte
