[Paranoia] Freshly damaged drive w/ cdparanoia?

[CJ Kucera]

Hello all.  Upon encounting a severely-scratched-up CD, I figured I'd
let cdparanoia have a go at recovering the disc, so I started off a
process to rip the tracks and ended up letting it go overnight because
some of the tracks were taking ages to get through.

When I got back in the morning it had still been working on one of the
tracks, and my xterm's scrollbuffer was all full of various errors 
(unfortunately I didn't think to copy the errors into a text file or
anything), and after awhile I ended up just killing the process,
figuring that I'd clean off the disc again and try on the troublesome
track again.

However, from that point on, it seems that the drive itself has become
damaged somehow, and refuses to read *any* disc.  I'm curious if anyone's
come across this behavior w/ cdparanoia before...  It seems to me that
it's just got to be a cruel bit of coincidence that the drive should
die in the middle of attempting to read a rather badly-damaged disc,
but is there something in there which could actually cause some lasting
damage on the drive?

Some details, and info on what I've done since then; if this is too far
off-topic for the list, just ignore it:

The drive itself is actually a CD/DVD burner, Sony DW-U10A, being run
in SCSI emulation mode.  I was running kernel 2.4.29 at the time of
ripping, and I've successfully ripped many a disc with the drive (on
the same day as these problems developed, no less).

Mechanically the drive seems fine.  It can eject and load discs with
no problems, but when the disc goes in the drive, the amber light
just stays on, the disc spins around (I know this because I've noted
the orientation of the disc as I put it in, and it usually comes out
in a different orientation) doing nothing else.  Eventually the amber
light goes off, and no program I use is able to access the disc at all.

I tried rebooting, of course, and I tried several cold boots, once even
unplugging the IDE cable inbetween, to no avail.  I tried booting into
a 2.6.11 kernel to see if that would make a difference, which it didn't,
and then I plugged the drive into another PC to see if it was actually
the controller or maybe the IDE cable which was causing problems, which
it wasn't (when on that PC, the drive would do the same thing; sit
spinning for awhile when a disc was inserted, and nothing could access
the drive).

So, I got to thinking that perhaps the firmware on the drive got FUBARed
somewhere along the way.  The only actual update I could find for the
DW-U10A was this crazy exe which was encoded primarily in Japanese
which would have brought the firmware up to 1.1e, but it didn't seem to
think that my drive was acceptable for the upgrade.  I *did* find a
utility which claimed to softmod the drive into thinking that it was
a DRU-500A (the DW-U10A is just the OEM version of said drive; apparently
they're identical otherwise), and *that* patch applied without problems,
though it didn't have any impact on drive behavior (apparently the drive
*had* been at firmware 1.1d, for what it's worth).  After that I grabbed
Sony's firmware update for the DRU-500A which would bring it up to 2.1a
(from 1.0g on the other util), and that didn't have any impact on behavior
either.

Now the drive's back in my main Linux box, and the drive is recognized
properly by the kernel, a la:

> scsi0 : SCSI host adapter emulation for IDE ATAPI devices
>   Vendor: SONY      Model: DVD RW DRU-500A   Rev: 2.1a
>   Type:   CD-ROM                             ANSI SCSI revision: 02

... and a scanbus in cdrecord seems to do all right with the drive, too:

>   0,0,0     0) 'SONY    ' 'DVD RW DRU-500A ' '2.1a' Removable CD-ROM

... as you'd expect, but still no dice.

So yeah, if anyone's got any ideas, I'd appreciate hearing about 'em.
Thanks, and apologies for the long-winded post!

-CJ

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