I got an old Rampage computer and bought a new 120 GB hard drive for it. The old hard drive is SCSI, but the machine has IDE support and an IDE CD-ROM.
First I formatted the old hard drive and did a base install of Debian on it from a CD, which worked fine. I then installed the new disk. The CD-ROM had been primary master; I moved it over to secondary, and made the new disk primary master.
The hard disk works fine – I partitioned it in Debian and I can use it without problems. But now the CD-ROM doesn’t work.
When I insert a CD, the light on the drive blinks perpetually. It never seems to spin up. I can eject the drive from Debian, but while doing so it gives me the following error:
If I try to run “mount /cdrom”, it gives me more or less the same thing:
I have no idea what any of this means. I have tried using the CD-ROM on the same cable as the hard drive – making it primary slave – and I get the same result. Amazingly, I tried disconnecting the new drive and returning everything to the way it was, and it still doesn’t work.
It’s possible that the lens is just dirty. Many stores sell relatively cheap cleaning CDs, though I don’t know if they’ll run under Linux.
Also check the pins on the drive’s IDE interface to make sure none of them got bent when you were moving the cable around. One bad connection can make all kinds of funny things happen.
I have had drives get dirty lenses before, and generally they have worked intermittently, rather than not at all. I thought a dirty lens was unlikely in this case since (a) it stopped working completely and (b) it had worked perfectly just a few hours before.
However . . . I just put the drive in another computer to see if it would work, and got the same result. So, since the pins look fine, your hypothesis of a dirty lens is probably right.
I’ve taken the CD-ROM out of the other computer and will be using it for now.