Re: No such device or address errors

On Sat, Jan 22, 2005 at 11:42:38AM -0800, Jonathan Morace wrote:
> This leads me to believe there might be something in the core linux
> SCSI code, a fundamental problem with older Plextor CDROM drives, or
> something cdparanoia is doing that is somehow triggering this. 

Starting in late 1998-ish, Plextor drives went over the top trying to
put paranoia-like capability into the drive firmware such that if they
hit a media error, they would retry endlessly and as far as the
computer was concerned, the drive had disappeared.  There was no way
to interrupt the drive or abort it; it would not reappear after a bus
reset because it was still occupied trying to get that damned sector.
They would sometimes do this even on brand new commercial disks that
had manufacturing defects that wouldn't make other drives even hiccup.

The behavior appeared in a specific firmware update (1.03 maybe?); in
addition, it was a firmware update that couldn't be backed out by
reverting to an earlier revision, and at that point I abandoned
buying/recommending Plextor.  I don't know if they ever fixed the
problem.

Monty