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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."
Other linux distros? I'm sure if this was a real CD drive problem, it would show up on other distros, or is the Mandrake CD the only one expecting the CD-ROM drive to work?
I'll be that the LG CD-ROM is a WinCDROM, kinda like some modems are WinModems. Mabye the drive knows how to get boot info off of the cd, but nothing else. It may rely on a windows driver to do its work for it. If it is a WinCDROM, what does that mean for other hardware? Are we now going to see WinHardDrives? This could cause a major problem in the desktop linux world.
I haven't a clue if this is right; it could be a start, but probably isn't.
Anyone else had their systems destroyed by DiskDrake?
Some number of years ago there was one version of Mandrake that came with a free copy of partitionmagic in the box. However, the box implied that it was part of the installation process. In fact you had to do something funky involving poking around on CD 3 in the box.
When installing normally, it brought up DiskDrake, which unlike many programs of its type-- for example, fdisk-- does not make it clear when writing parition tables "I AM REFORMATTING YOUR DISK WITH WHATEVER'S ON THE SCREEN RIGHT NOW". The "ok, writing parittions now" dialogue was unclear even more so. It was very easy to fall into DiskDrake during the installation and think that it was PartitionMagic.
My GF accidentally had her windows system trashed when attempting to install linux out of curiousity. She is now soured to linux forever and refuses to touch it, since it's the thing that ate her hard drive. I can't blame her, as at one point I fell victim to the same thing and had a machine at a place where i was working at the time's hard drive get wiped because I did not realize I had just okayed the overwriting of the partition table.
Now, given, had this happened in the installation of, say, Gentoo or something, I would have been like, okay, so a mistake was made in installing an infamously techie-specific distro. Should have known this was expert stuff and been more careful. But this was MANDRAKE. It was supposed to be the "luser-friendly" distro. How can the "luser-friendly" distro be so idiot-unfriendly when doing THE MOST DANGEROUS PART OF THE ENTIRE INSTALL PROCESS?
Needless to say, I haven't been happy with Mandrake since this point.
Actually, the POKE would change the power supply voltages, thereby smoking the whole thing...
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
Actually, pretty much any IDE device could be destroyed by a hostile driver. There was some discussion about this on the Linux-Kernel list about a year ago.
Solution: Don't buy IDE.
So, we all know the GPL says "No warranty..." etc. However, I'm willing to be this is the first time that an actual distribution -- something with a real company behind it (non-profits don't count, so don't post "you forgot GNU/FSF" as a reply) -- has put actual hardware at risk. I could easily see some small business, who installed Mandrake on their machines, get very upset that their CD-ROM drives released magic smoke. Yeah, ok, CD-ROM drives are dirt cheap these days, but that's not the point. This could lead to a test of the GPL in court. It will be interesting to see if anything happens.
No, I'm not saying anyone with a toasted CD-ROM drive has a valid case, but having a valid case is hardly required for filing suit. Will this lead to more disclaimers on packaging? At the very least, I'm sure the Microsoft PR folks are going have a field day with this, especially given the drives are found in a major manufacturer's computers (Dell), and not just some Joe's-computer-store brand. This will only fuel their "See, you lost a CD-ROM drive and because it's open-source, there's no one to cry to" argument.
Or perhaps someone will tell me this is not the first time a distro has created a risk for hardware, and this will all be moot.
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
We have standards for that sort of thing. Presumably, the LG optical drives are standard ATAPI drives, not "Windows drives". If Linux destroys them with standard CD-ROM drivers, then it's a problem with the drives.
In fact, it's hard to see how any CD-ROM driver should be able to destroy any CD-ROM drive unless the drive has some kind of serious design flaw.
It's not just Mandrake generally.... It's only (known) to happen to Mandrake 9.2. Obvriously the install program does something in just the right (/wrong) way that triggers this error in the drives.
There are all sorts of problems that only engage if you do things in PRECISELY the wrong way. I'm guessing that there are Windows users who have had their LG drives spontaneously disentegrate, but there's been no pattern discerned... It just seemed like random product faulure.
The Mandrake 9.2 install, on the other hand, has precisely the wrong timing to cause self-destruction, and it just happens to do it on a reproducable basis -- so now you can see what the lg drives are doing wrong (if you have enough on hand to pinpoint the triggering instructions).
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
I had a Dell sever CD-ROM die this august while installing gentoo. Any chance it was this? I wrote it off to it being a new drive failing during the break in period, and dell mailed me a new one and I never thought twice about it.
I'm not sure about my Nintendo Gamecube though. I don't think it has a flashable OS, I'm not certain though.
People keep mentioning the problems the PET had when you did a POKE that set two things to be an output. Actually, IIRC, that's sort-of an urban legend in that supposedly the consequences weren't as bad as they've been made out to be. A nicer example, to my mind, is the Amiga A600. This had a small problem in that if you used the little 2.5" IDE drive built-in to it, and used one of the many tools on the 'net to do a SCSI low level format (SCSI was the de-facto standard on the Amiga, so the A600, A1200, and A4000's IDE drives were accessed via a "fake" scsi.device driver C= supplied), there were reports many would burn up (as in smoke would start to waft out from inside the computer.)
The original IBM PC had a CGA card based upon the 6845 Video Chip. You could set any frequencies you wanted if you acccessed the chip directly, which was unfortunate, because you could set the vertical scan rate to have the electron gun of the monitor point at regions it wasn't supposed to. Bang.
The Amiga IDE thing was the last major example of the non-deliberate "destroy hardware with software" flaws I read about. Nowadays, just about all computer hardware is designed to be software upgradable. And just about all computer hardware uses the software that's being upgraded to manage the upgrading. So pretty much all computer hardware out today can be destroyed by software.
And, of course, with everyone having their own standards for how to transfer this data, it only takes someone's "probe" code, sending different types of command to different types of device, to accidentally send the wrong thing to a device, and you have one dead device. Lovely.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Are you some kind of moron?
You sure showed that guy. Let's see him try to post here again.
Though I agree with the meaning of your post, its delivery could use some polish.
More of my thoughts
That is stupidiest BS I've seen. OS can e.g. override firmware of the disk drive. If it writes bogus firmware, the disk will be permanently damaged.
Your statement is the one that rates higher on the stupidiy scale. A hardware device should have a well-defined protocol for communicating with the host controller (or computer), i.e. ATAPI. A good hardware device implementation will never be damaged by a controller or computer that uses that protocol in any way within the specifications of that protocol. Additionally, a good implementation will also be resistant to slight non-standard variations (just like a good programmer always checks the data from an outside source, never trusting it).
If LG had done this, there would be no way
to damage or destroy thge drive. Even if LG allows for uploadable firmware, a well-designed system would always use a robust system for firmware updates that would minimize the likelihood of normal data from the host ever matching the firmware update command, and would also require a good hash on the firmware before "going live" with it (i.e. SHA-1 or something).
This is LG's mistake. Mandrake should work-around it because Mandrake users with LG drives would appreciate it. And I believe they are. LG needs to issue an emergency firmware update, and hit their engineers over the head with a cluebat.
Lete not get all worked up, we all know what is going to happen.
1. LG continues to deny any responsibility.
2. The usual suspects will float a few pieces on the ZD rags and perhaps C|Net spreading FUD that Linux is dangerous.
3. One of the Linux IDE Gods will become sufficently annoyed that a proper investigation will happen, the flaw in LG's firmware will be documented in overkill detail.
4. The PR war will turn against LG, they will repent and issue a firmware update, stick a penguin somewhere deep on their support site and declare their eternal love of all things Linux. But it will strictly be for PR.
5. Once understood, a workaround will keep Linux from destroying unpatched drives. Probably something as simple as not checking for packet writing capacity unless basic RW support has already been detected.
6. No longterm changes anywhere. Nothing to see here, move along.
Democrat delenda est
LG doesn't support Linux, so this problem doesn't exist in their eyes.
When I bought my LG CD burner, they claimed compatibility with Linux - Slackware 2.0, but Linux - on the box.
I submitted an article about this after I fried THREE CD-ROMs in about 2 hours installing 9.2 on a rack of 5 machines. In the article I submitted were the exact model numbers of the dead puppies. All that remains of the article now is:
- 2003-10-23 20:40:24 Mandrake 9.2 Eats CD-ROM Drives On Install (articles,mandrake) (rejected)
When I get back to work Monday I'll post that info (and the firmware versions, if I can get them) to the Mandrake Club Install forum. Of course, that's where I should have posted it in the first place. I'll know better next time, but I tried to warn 'ya!
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insuficiently advanced.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
I know that bitching about free software will not get me good karma points, but Mandrake 9.1 made me loose a good night of sleep yesterday. I have already installed it on one computer and was using it under Vmware, and thought it was a dream distro. As Red Hat has put their new versions on a very short life cicle, I am looking for alternatives and Mandrake seemed perfect.
I am not the only computer user at home, so I can't nix Windows. I installed Mandrake 9.1 on my brand new computer, and Lilo corrupted the MBR so bad that it didn't even load - it just showed a sequence of 9s. I had to boot from a floppy and do a fdisk /mbr to restore the MBR, what put me back on a Windows-only enviroment. I have installed several times Red Hat and Conectiva, and this sort of thing had never happened to me. I am going to submit a bug to Mandrake and go back to Red Hat 8.
These kind of catastrophic bugs, that make your computer unbootable or damage a hardware piece, can drive newbies away from Linux entirely.
If you're going to mention that, you could at least get its name (Therac-25) correct so people could google for what actually happened.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Or use a boot CD if you're one of those people who hopped right to it and got rid of your floppy drive, the way Microsoft wants you to (Microsoft has tried long and hard to eliminate 'legacy' hardware from PCs)
It was Apple who started shipping floppy-free computers, not Microsoft. I've never heard of Microsoft standing in opposition to floppy drives. And it's not only Microsoft who doesn't want to handle 'legacy' hardware - any sane OS programmer would like to be free of most of the junk hardware they have to support.
I disagree in part. Sending a command to a device without knowing it is supported is not good ATA practice at all. The patch they applied should have checked but didn't.
Shipping easy to fry drives isnt bright either and I suspect LG know this without any help, especially when they get lorry fulls of faulty drives back. Not only can a wrong command occur due to an error on the cable (very unlikely) so should be handled tolerantly, but every virus writer on the planet now knows how to toast all the LG ROMs (and rebadged LG ROMs).
I just hope Mandrake have the decency to recall any boxed sets sitting in warehouses and heading to shops and replace the CD's in them.
This particular feature isn't something a marketing person is going to put on a box. Hell, half of them have enough problems just listing technical standards. "Includes safe firmware flashing feature!" isn't going to appear in a jagged "flash" label on the front of the box, and it's unlikely to appear in the list of technical features either.
It's funny you would say that. I have a Gigabyte motherboard box sitting right here which states as it's second major "feature", "DualBIOS: A new revolution in Motherboard." Although it admittedly follows the DualBIOS advertisement up with the nonsensical tagline "Doubles your PC's stability". It also had a large sticker for DualBIOS across the PCI slots when I first opened it up. DualBIOS is a secondary BIOS which can be toggled in place of the primary BIOS if a flash goes bad or a nasty virus comes along.
Random and weird software I've written.