Hello,
please CC me, I'm not subscribed.
If any kernel developer is interested in more specific information please mail me, I can build kernels, I can apply patches, though have not done it regularly.
I'd like to get the DVD drive working somehow. I have googled a lot and did not find any more ideas what to do. Some good keywords to find a solution would suffice at that end.
Rough problem description:
I have a Tyan mainboard with NVIDIA chipset CK804. The only SATA/IDE device is a SATA DVD combo, the harddisks are on a RAID controller from 3ware. The harddisks are fine.
The openSuSE 10.3 boot dvds fail after booting from the BIOS, the installation kernel cannot use the DVD drive. That kernel uses libata and sata_nv pata_amd as drivers. The drive is recognized but it cannot be used. This is the situation probably during install from DVD and now in the running system after a network install it persists.
Reading from the dvd device /dev/sr0 with dd stops after at most 119kb of rubbish read. Mounting fails with superblock not found.
When trying to remove the pata_amd module I get an Oops. I tried to remove the modules to have a chance to reload them with other options (atapi_enable), but that did not help, even after rebooting.
A vanilla 2.6.23.1 kernel behaves even less friendly, the dd on /dev/sr0 causes a hard reset.
So there are clearly some problems with libata in this system.
I have failed switching away from libata getting the drive to be recognized at all.