LG CD-ROMs Destroyed by Mandrake 9.2

An anonymous reader writes "The latest offering of Mandrake's distribution, 9.2, has been found to not only be incompatible with some LG CD-ROM drives, but to destroy them during the installation process. Mandrake have posted information on their errata page and further information can be found on this thread [google]. Along with over 350Mb of updates within a week of release, it's not been a good start for this latest release."

Comments

the culprit

[spoonist]

appears to be a kernel patch

I found this post.

Nobody really knows what the problem is at this point, but yes, it is the case that ANY hardware that can be put out of commission by software is at fault, morally. The latest from the cooker list is that the problem seems to affect LG cdroms (not burners, not dvds) with the model number CRD-84xx, and that it seems to have been triggered by a patch for packet-writing added to the 2.4.22-rc2q5 kernel on Aug 15.

Re:Funny

[dissy]

> If Windows would do this to your drive there would be a public outcry. Here on
> /. it is more like "ah well, shit happens, it's mentioned in the errata so suck
> it up and get over it".

But windows could do this. All it would have to do is send one of the two normal APATI commands to this cdrom drive, and it will fry just the same.

LG stated the bug is in their cdrom drive, and one of two commands sent to it will execute the buggy routine in firmware, causing it to dump its firmware totally.
They cant be fixed because to flash firmware, you have to use a program that is in the firmware in the first place.

Re:Warranty

[Mashiki]

Already been done. "Back in the day", there were plenty of virus written that would throw your monitor out of sync, simply baking the tube.

Some others that whould smash the read/write heads of your HDD into the spindle destroying the drive, that's why it's controlled at the hardware level now. That was back when the heads actually required a seperate program to park them. That was alot of fun.

I'd say that Mandrake is responsable for the replacement of those drives.

Apparently already fixed by LG...

[leonbrooks]

...but they should have advised the users of certain models of their drives to check and possibly update the drive firmware.

The thing which kills the drives is - wait for it - setting them up for packet writing. The hackers who made the patch to do this (included starting with Mandrake 9.2rc1) may be able to figure out a way to do it without triggering LG's bug, or may not, in which case any Linux kernel which features this packet writing code will kill a broken LG drive.

Note that this happens when the drive is init'ed, not when you write a CD with one, so you'll kill a drive just as effectively even if you install over the network or whatever.

As to responsibility, well... the drive software is broken, end of story. If your LG drive dies, take it back and make a warranty claim.

For those who assert that Mandrake should have tested 9.2 on every known drive before releasing it, the answer is that Mandrake did indeed test 9.2 on these models of LG drives, but none of their testers happened to have the broken firmware revision(s). <shrug>

For those speculating about what would happen if it had been MS-Windows-XP's problem instead, the only differences would have been that more than 80% of all broken LG drives would have been killed by now due to semi-forced upgrades, Penguinistas would have been gleefully rejoicing that their software didn't kill drives, and Microsoft would still be ignoring the problem and we'd expect them to for at least another two weeks.

I don't know whether it's possible to flash a killed drive's firmware and resurrect it, or whether the broken firmware actually destroys hardware.