[Paranoia] No such device or address errors

Alec Wood alecwood at cs.uchicago.edu
Mon Jan 24 07:14:50 PST 2005


Thus spake Monty:

> 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
...
> 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.

Well, my SCSI PlexWriter 12/10/32 (firmware 1.05) has never given me
THAT problem.  There is one funny thing that is DOES do, though.  On a
small number of my audio discs (mostly burned ones but a few commercial)
it will spend about 10 seconds trying to read the TOC (I guess that's
what's going on anyway), then it will spin down and a light will blink.
At this point all attempts to access the media result in a "no disc in
drive" type error.  This is with discs that are unscratched and read
fine on other drives.

Other than that it never gives me any problems. <shrug>

Cheers,
-Alec


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