[Tfug] fail to read cdrom in ubuntu

[JD Rogers]

>> When I put a CD in the drive, the drive light sits there trying to
>> read for a bit. lshw -C disk reports status=busy. Eventually it times
>> out, and I lshw -C disk reports status=nodisc.
>
> I find this sometimes.  It seems related to the brand of CD or DVD.  My
> laptop reads or writes almost any brand but my desktops with older CD/DVD
> readers choke on some.  I find Walgreen on sale generic disks seem to go
> from machine to machine best.  I burn an extra copy though because I don't
> trust them very much.

My problem is with both burned disks as well as with stamped disks. It
consistently fails on disk that were working in this machine
previously. So I don't think it depends on brand. It's very strange,
and I wish I could figure out something to try to at least continue
narrowing down what causes it, but right now, I'm stumped.

>
> Another source of the problem MIGHT be upgrading to 9.10.  I did this on
> my machine at work and lost sound.  As World Care is shut down until after
> January 1, I won't be able to check further until then.  I will probably
> do a fresh install then.

I think this was caused or at least complicated by the upgrade. I
don't think it was actually due to the upgrade itself, but perhaps
because the system used ide drives and saw the cdrom device as
/dev/hda whereas now it is using scsi and see's /dev/sg0. I guess I
may try forcing the drive to be used as IDE, but that *may* involve
rolling a custom kernel.

The trouble is I haven't kept up with how Ubuntu uses hal and it's
various automagic configuration stuff, so if anyone has a simple
method to revert to using the IDE driver for the cdrom (as hda), I'd
appreciate that.

JDR