Subj : Problem reading CD
To   : All
From : Christopher Perrault
Date : Fri Sep 16 2005 03:11 pm

Hi everyone

Problem:

I used K3B to copy all the data files I wanted to save, to a cd. I don't do a
whole lot of writing to CD, but it seems pretty straight forward. After I
copied the files over, I checked the CD to make sure everything got copied
correctly.
 I did the same with my Pictures directory so that I had a seperate cd with
just my pictures saved to it. I checked the Pictures CD and it also looked ok.
Note that when I saved to both CD's I checked the option to use the 4X write
speed. Usually I just do 1X speed, but that night, boy was I living on the
edge...
Anyway, once I did that I prompty patted myself on the back for having the half
a brain that is necessary to save ones information before doing a system
reinstall. Please note this will come back to haunt me later in the story.

This was all being done because of several things I was doing to my machine.
First I needed (well, wanted) to reinstall Mandrake 9.2 and repartition the
harddrive so that the OS got all of it. I also had to install a new power
supply.
Here's what I did:

1) I put the new power supply in.
2) Plugged in a new keyboard and mouse.
3) Performed the operating system reinstall. I had problems with the reinstall
and had to redo it a few times. It seems that the 9.2 installer either has
problems performing large installs(like almost everything), or the packages
that are installed a just corrupt. I eventually scaled back some of what I was
installing, and it went just fine.

The good news is that KDE seems a good deal faster now, so I'm guessing that
replacing the power supply at least was a good idea. Also the new mouse a more
responsive so that will probably make it seem quicker also.

Now on to the bad news. Remember that wonderfull backup of data to CD I was
patting myself on the back for earlier? Well when I put that CD into the drive
and try to access it, it just hangs whatever I'm trying to access it with and a
CD isn't found in the drive. I've tried using Konqueror, doing an ls from
console and opening the directory from applications like K3B. Wherever I do it
from it just SITS there. I put in my cd with the pictures on it and luckily
THEY are ok, but I would still like to get my stuff off of the other cd as I
had quite a bit of stuff there I would  like to hold on to, especially a Java
project I am working on.
Has anyone run into this sort of situation before? I have not yet tried the CD
on another machine, since this is the only one I have up here at the moment. I
will tried to pop it into someone elses machine  if I get the chance today to
see if it will work there. If the data is at least ok, then I can cope with
using another machine to save it to another cd if necessary.
Again, the only thing I did differently when I did the actual save of
information is I chose the 4X write speed instead of 1X, I stuck with the
defaults on all the other options.
I am running
AMD K6-II 500 mhz
(new) Antec 500 Watt power supply
AverMedia TV Tuner card(this was also installed right before the OS reinstall)
One Hard Drive (Western Digital 7200rpm 100 Gig)
and one optical drive, an Optowrite 48x16x48x CDRW.

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///////                      Chris Perrault                         //////////
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