[TriLUG] Linux causes damage to LG CD-ROM drives (Dells) ?

[Sinner from the Prairy]

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On Friday 24 October 2003 11:0211am, Jeremy Portzer wrote:
> How is it that a driver (presumable, the IDE / ATAPI driver in Linux)
> can cause physical damage like this?  Has anyone encountered this?
> Seems very odd in this day and age.

The answer: 

LG developers are laaaaaaazy. LG used a standard IDE/ATAPI command 
(FLUSH_CACHE) as  "LG's Upload Firmware" (TM)(R)(C) . 

Expect to see this behaviour in the upcoming SuSE as well.




See:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=83579&cid=7311315

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."

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=83579&cid=7310137

I just read a post from Alan Cox, it appears that if you send a flush 
cache command to the specific LG drives or their compaq rebadged ones, 
the drive gets fried. So this really has nothing to do with Mandrake 
and everything to do with a poorly designed drive.



There's more on http://groups.google.com.



Salut,
Sinner
- -- 
http://www.ibiblio.org/sinner/     Linux User # 89976
Testing Mandrake 9.1 -    Linux Machine # 38068
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