[luau] trouble with cdrw

[R. Scott Belford]

This almost falls into the need help with linux category, but, we are 
having trouble getting past the BIOS.  Some time ago I received a bunch 
of great suggestions from people on the list about cd burner success in 
linux.  It was generally believed that an ATAPI compliant drive would 
work.  I recently bought a bunch of these for a school, and we are 
having the below mentioned trouble.  Before I return them, I have sent 
the following help request to Sony and Gigabyte.  I am going to bounce 
it through here as well in case any of you have run into this 
perplexer.  The band-aid approach of using a standard cdrom to install 
the OS has worked on these machines, so the kids are using linux, but, 
they need to have a drive that will boot.


I have purchased 10 of these SONY CRX195 drives for use in a system 
based on the Gigabyte GA-7VKML motherboard.  When these cdrw's are 
connected to the motherboard on the primay or secondary channel as 
either master or slave, the motherboard hangs for a long time while 
posting.  The ide light for the motherboard stays on, and the door of 
the drive will not open or close.  After a while the machine continues 
to post, but if the drives have bootable media in them, the BIOS reads 
the cdrw's as small hard drives and offers the cylinders, heads, etc, 
info for the bootable media in the cdrw.  Gigabyte has an AUTO 
selection, a CD selection, and an OTHER selection in its BIOS for 
choosing ide devices.  I have tried each option.  When I choose OTHER, 
the BIOS reports that this is a non ATAPI device.  Any suggestions?  I 
notice that on the back of the drive that there are 6 pins to the far 
left that are not jumpered.  I have found that regular cdroms boot just 
fine.  These have two of the six pins to the back left side of the drive 
jumpered.

This has happened with all 9 drives.  We did a build it yourself class, 
so we have many different builders with the same result.  It seems like 
hardware problems, but, 9 instances of the same issues suggests idiocy 
in the process.

thanks for any suggestion you may have

scott