Slashdot Mirror
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."
Someone find a 1st level Cleric so they can cast Protection from Evil on these Lawful Good CD-ROMs. That should keep the evil Mandrakes from destroying them.
At least they should get a freakin' saving throw. What a harsh DM.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Perhaps the drives don't truly conform to ATAPI standards. This is probably the first drive ever that has been "damaged" by Linux. Sorry, LG, you probably should test these things.
...and software is capable of destroying your products, you're fucking fired.
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.
Do you think there might be a problem with your hardware if it can be destroyed solely with software?
"Smoking helps you lose weight - one lung at a time" -- A. E. Neumann
I know quite a few people who have had big problems with LG drives. I think that they are very unreliable anyway. Lots of people I know also have LG burners that mess up cds when burning. Stay away. Anybody else know people with faulty drives?
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.
People started noting this a week ago:
9.2 FRIED my CDROM drives
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
appears to be a kernel patch
I found this post.
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/
The kernel Mandrake uses enables a feature on CDROM drives. This kernel feature is officially not production stable yet, so other distro's don't use it YET. LG drives with buggy firmware die if this feature is enabled. LG doesn't support Linux, so this problem doesn't exist in their eyes.
Conclusion: It will happen to ANY distribution that uses kernels with this enabled. Mandrake unfortunately hit the trigger first in an attempt to have a slightly too cool kernel.
I've had this exact problem with the Cool Linux CD: http://emergencycd2.sourceforge.net/ This article just confirms the problem. I was using a Dell OptiPlex GX1 and the system would just halt on boot. Then on reboot the drive was no longer detected. The drive would not even respond to an eject - I had to do it manually to get my CD back. Unfortunately, I assumed that a CD-ROM could not be damaged by software and that this drive just happened to fail as I was booting...so I tried it on another system! Now I've got two dead CD-ROM drives waiting to be returned to Dell. Now time to play stupid about why the drives failed to get an RMA!
I had an old 48X LG-CDROM that got fried by SuSE 8.0. I also heard that my freind had his monitor destroyed by Debian (due to the buggy Xfree86 3.3.7.debian).
If you're a hardware manufacturer...and software is capable of destroying your products, you're fucking fired.
So how do you propose putting firmware updates into CD-ROM drives, DVD drives, modems, etc.? Just about any peripheral which has flashable firmware can be rendered unusable by software.
Dude, software should never be able to damage hardware. Not in 2003. Part of this is just common sense -- how could anyone design hardware that bad? But beyond that, it is only a matter of time before someone writes a virus that includes this cute little effect. It is no longer possible to blow up a CRT by giving it an out-of-range signal, or to call halt-and-catch-fire, or to blow up your car's engine by overreving it (assume you haven't screwed with the rev limiter). It is not okay for normal usage to damage hardware, and in the computer world 'normal usage' means any data at all, even malicious or (in the case of Mandrake, it seems) really bad data.
I've had this sig for three days.
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.
> 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.
Yes, software -can- damage hardware if you don't know what you are doing.
When I first installed Slackware in '96, I had a brand new ViewSonic 17PS monitor which was not recognized by Linux by default. I had to research the monitor capabilities and I hand-crafted the XF86 modelines.
When I first ran X, the monitor made this horrible screeching noise. Yikes! I quickly dropped out of X and found someone else's modelines and put them in, then the monitor worked fine (still does).
Linux, hardware and standards are all improving, but ultimately things can go wrong - always read the hardware HOWTO first...
I wonder how many folks here would be bitching out LG if it was XP that was trashing the hardware?
1984 was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual.
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.
LG CD-ROM Drive: "I'll need a weapon to fight off drunken Mandrake CDs when I get there."
Gary Gygax: "Here, take my +1 mace."
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.
Om, nomnomnom...
I don't take the attitude that "shit happens". I think it sucks hardcore, and I feel terrible for those people currently troubleshooting this problem, totally unaware that sudden damage of hardware is actually a possibility.
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
While it is nice that Slashdot posts this as a service to the community, it could have been an idea to at least try and get more facts before posting this.
Firstly, it seems to be only (or mostly) CD-ROM drives, and not CD-RW drives or CD/DVD drives, however Mandrakesoft is compiling a list of the affected model numbers.
Secondly, not all drives of the same model number are affected, since some drives of the same model, but with differing firmware revisions, have different results.
Thirdly, this is a hardware/firmware defect, which seems to be triggered by the packet writing patch (I believe SuSE has shipped with this patch for some time, so LG drives could be affected under SuSE). If your drive is still under warranty, LG should replace it.
It may also be possible to reflash the drives with a working firmware, but no-one has reported success with that yet.
Instead of posting a link to alt.os.linux.mandrake, maybe next time Slashdot can link to the thread on the cooker mailing list which has been posted to by the Mandrakesoft people investigating the issue? But I guess that's too much to ask of Slashdot.
Gee, you'd think there was a business agenda pushing the release of this product before its ready. However, we know that doesn't happen in the Linux world.
How long before this code is lifted and put into a virus?
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.
Software != Firmware.
The mandrake problem doesn't have anything to do with firmware as far as I can tell, you just send a flush command to the drive, and it fails.
A simple software command should never, EVER be able to fry hardware. Screwing with the firmware is another problem entirely.
The Apple case was caused by the CD manufacturer's violating standards, here AFAIK mandrake isn't violating standards
Then put a separate copy of the original firmware into read-only memory at manufacturing time and provide a physical button that writes the known good firmware over the current firmware...
Of course not. We'd still be bashing LG.
Because lots of us run Windows, and we know just as well as anyone else that they use ATAPI just like the rest of the fucking world to talk to the drive.
So, if the drive dies when you run GearPro with packet-write support, or the UDF CDR feature of explorer, but no other drive dies when you use it, then would you blame GearPro, Microsoft, or LG?
Sure, there'd be some jokes made, yadayada, but no moreso than usual-> no one would seriously blame MS (and stay modded up). Slashdotters want to know the real cause of their technological troubles, no matter who's involved.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Yes you are right software should not break hardware. So WTF is wrong with LG eh?
If you don't like what I write don't be a CS and mod it down. Refute it.
Yea I can't spell. So what is your point?
Windows 95 was able to destroy certain early Athlon motherboards, by erasing the BIOS. This happened during the hardware detect, and so of course you didn't get very far when it got to the point where it was time to reboot!
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
My MB does. Many Gibgabyte boards have a dual bios feature. And yes, it does have a restore factory defaults option.
Look on it as a lesson in life.
Treat other people with respect, be part of a "community", and they'll forgive you the odd unfortunate mistake.
Spend your life screwing over other people, think about nothing else except "number one" or "the bottom line" and, rightly or wrongly, any unfortunate mistake you made gets jumped on.
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
Me as a tech support of a cheapo cdrom buyers comunity (lg, creative, btc, benq, lite-on, even actima) have found that linux distros (red hat, mandrake, suse) always treats cdroms as shit . I mean having them spin at top revolutions all the time and such things. I have learned lessons installing linux distros from CDROM, enough to prefer to install from any other source at all costs, instead of shorten dramatically my cdrom lifecycle.
What I don't understand is why windows generally knows better how to deal nicely with cdroms even with the new ones. As far as I know there aren't drivers specific to a model or brand embedded in windows and you don't install any normally. Obviously CDROMs are mainly designed for windows, but doesn't linux developers use this guidelines?
Anyway for me this is a kind of selection. Shall the bad hardware die in the hands of the transparent ever growing monster.
How much until we have "open" hardware?
...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.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
That there's such a showstopper of a bug in a recent mandrake release comes as no surprise.
I'm not a linux expert but I do like fiddling around with it. And I'm not afraid of using a CLI. I find with a few minor exceptions Linux meets my needs as a desktop user -- student/home user. KDE + Mozilla + OpenOffice and XMMS. Everything else is just nice.
Mandrake 8.1 was the first distribution that would boot on my computer out of the box. Or rather after burning the downloaded ISO's. I had good experiences with 8.1, 8.2 & 9.0.
Mandrake 9.1 got to be so annoying that I switched to Suse 8.2
Mandrake 9.1 had annoying flaws in the ADSL scripts. Everything was ok in 9.0. I thought the problem would surely be fixed in the 9.2 betas and RC's. But, no. I had to copy and manually edit even after using Mandrake Control Center. The error was something like "n=eth0 (using >Name of the NIC module
In addition there were errors error in the fstab. So that there were always odd errors in mounting my cdrom & floppy. Again the result of carelessness and sloppiness.
All of the above can be found in a search of ALT.OS.LINUX.MANDRAKE on google groups.
Mandrake actually tested on several broken models of LG drive, including one I own. It didn't kill any of them. Why not? Well, it turns out that none of the drives tested had the broken firmware revision(s).
Using your reasoning, Mandrake should have tested every single firmware release of every single model of every single piece of hardware that their OS interacts with - in all possible combinations - with every single subrelease of their own kernel. Got a spare aeon or two?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
In that case, however, it didn't damage the hardware...it crashed the OS. And then when it was rebooting, it reads from the CD drive and crashes again...and you can't eject the CD manually, because on Macs no removable media can be ejected manually. There isn't even a pinhole. Stupid design, but nothing is ruined, if you know what you are doing. (You can eject from open firmware)
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
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.
With his problem, if the Mandrake installer is conforming to standards when accessing the drive, and the drive fails because it doen't meet those standards, then it's the drive at fault. If however, the Mandrake installer is pushing something too far and stepping outside the boundries the standard specifies, then Mandrake would be at fault.
It appears at this point that they (Mandrake) are still looking into which of the two above it is.
I AM, therefore I THINK!
Geez, they make phones, hard drives, and that crazy internet fridge.
If a drive can be trashed by a Mandrake CD, lord only knows what my cooking will do to their fridge. Eek.
Somehow this reminds me of Hofstadter's illustration of Godel's incompleteness theorem in Godel, Escher, Bach... wherein Achilles has a phonograph which he claims can reproduce any sound, so the tortoise gives him a record with a sound which destroys phonographs...
Well, it was funny to me.
Where are you going?
It isn't overspinning them. It is sending a standard flush-cache command to the drive. It was recently added to the kernel. Windows doesn't use it, either. LG didn't implement it properly. It crashes the firmware. And you can't reflash the firmware because the flashing is done by a program IN the firmware :O
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
A standard ATAPI command with standard parameters etc etc does the damage to certain revisions of firmware on certain models of LG drive. The technical term for this kind of behaviour is "suicide". Take your drive in and warranty it.
R. I. P.
L.G. Drive
Killed by
Firmware
- 2003 -
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
And I agree. They should. (-: Just a s-l-i-g-h-t incompatibility there :-)
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
A flush command which happens while deciding whether they're a writer or not has been redefined (<thwack!>) by LG to mean "upload firmware" (with predictable results). To quote Juan Quintela from the Cooker list, "Yep, whoeved decided at LG that reusing for UPLOAD_FIRMWARE command FLUSH_CACHE comand should be shoot. Twice."
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
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
Who would you say is to blame?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Or you could just hold down the mouse button or the eject key on the keyboard while it was starting up. Simply press and hold one of those as soon as you hear the startup chime and any CD in the drive will be ejected.
In fact, a quick call to 1-800-MY-APPLE would have resulted in the above answer.
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.
Sorry, I can see that this argument has merit when it comes to complicated stuff like embedded routers,
Compared to CD-ROMs, routers are simple. Do you have any idea of the complexity of the firmware in the average CD-ROM drive?
but why the hell should a CD-ROM need to be firmware-upgradeable?
Because they are having read errors on copy-protected discs using Cactus Data Shield. Because the new CD-RW media introduced by Fictitious Corp. has a lower reflectivity than can be handled by the firmware currently in the drive. Because they discover that a small percentage of the drives are getting read errors at 52X on some CD-R 700MB media. Because the drives are exceeding FCC RF emission limits during motor start-up. Because the spindle motor manufacturer made a minor design change that requires a longer spin-down but didn't inform the drive manufacturer before shipping the drives. Because Promise's new IDE controller doesn't assert the cable select line soon enough after power-on. Because there is a problem when the CD-ROM drive is a slave to a Western Digital WD2000JB drive. Need some more examples?
Only it's not quite the traditional reason. Attention, sladerous humour coming up.
/Apologies.
An IYFEG firmware engineer is calling his cousin, who studied English, to discuss a problem of terminology.
IYFEG Engineer: Ni-haw-mah! Please, you speaking engrish, what to be meaning by "frush"?
Cousin: How-Mah! I think you mean "flush", it means to wipe, to clean, to get rid of something. Rike you flush the toiret.
Engineer: OK, I understand. Thank you. (puts down phone). Now, how do I implement a "flush" instruction on broody CD-ROM drive? Broody western committees not thinking straight! OK, I make feedback loop with +5v, so massive power surge wipes firmware crean. That should do it!
(later) PHB: Engineer! You implemented frush command correctry?
Engineer: Totarry, boss! It frushes creaner than a radies bottom!
PHB: OK, let's ship the damn thing.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Nicely done, but completely incorrect.
:)
Go look at any iMac, tray-loading or slot-loading, since that's what you're referring to (this problem was with the G3 iMac, not the G4). There is an eject pin on the far right side of the slot-load, and slightly down and to the right of the open button on the tray-loader. Both should be opened with a paper clip.
Neither of them worked with the RIAA CDs. The computer had to be disassembled by a Mac Technician (which I was when this was an issue), and the CD had to be removed physically. Even then, the drives didn't always work when you put them back together.
Not trying to be a dick, just letting you know the truth.
When encryption is outlawed, ?o'AZ-,++o+i++##4AoA+-/-C++bI+/.+~
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.