CD-ROM driver hangs on defective CDs

Terje Bergstrom (terje@iki.fi)
Sat, 18 May 1996 13:20:32 +0300

I recently bought Infomagic Linux Developer's Resource April 1996. Three of
the six CDs seem to be defective. I can take their directory listing just
fine, but whenever I try to access a defective file (cat file), the
accessing process just hangs.

I did a "strace cat defective-file >/dev/null" and cat seems to hang on the
first read() from the file. strace shows "read(3, " and nothing more. After
that the process can't be killed with kill -9, which seems to indicate that
in hung on kernel land.

To me this looks like a huge problem in CD-ROM or isofs code. If there's
anything that I can do to provide more information, please tell me. The
drive is usable otherwise even with the process hung, expect that the disk
can't be unmounted (of course).

My drive is a Hitachi CDR-7730 with ATAPI interface. The drive works on
other disks just fine and plays music CDs just fine, so it doesn't look
like a hardware problem to me. Kernel is version pre2.0.4 and I don't have
any other IDE-devices, thus CD-ROM is /dev/hda.

-- 
http://www.iki.fi/terje/