Hi all,

I finally got a download of 7.2 and installed it on a PII desktop with 512MB ram. Looks to be every bit as good as 7.0 but....

I tried to mount a cd after install and kept getting the error message"too many sym links" (from rox). I tried to mount the cd manually but kept getting errors. I tried both music and data cds but no luck. fstab has the entries for the two optical drives and they look to be the same as the fstab entries in 7.0. There is no trouble when mounting usb disks. I booted the live cd and could mount cd without trouble. The system has ubuntu on another partition and cds mount just fine. There is not problem with the disks or controller.

Anybody have any thoughts?

Katawin

Post your fstab so we can have a look.

Are you mounting the cd device via media?

Can you play an audio cd via xmms?

OK. I'll send a copy tomorrow

Yes

No

To save you from reading, the problem is solved. So unless you are curious and want to learn from my trouble----

here is a recap for those who are just now joining the show already in progress.

I couldn't mount the two cd drives. I got the following error message.

mount: Too many levels of symbolic links

Here is the snippet from the fstab

# Dynamic entries below
/dev/sda2 /mnt/sda2 ext3 noauto,users,exec 0 0
/dev/sdb1 /mnt/sdb1 vfat,ext3,ext2,reiserfs noauto,users,exec 0 0
/dev/sdb4 /mnt/sdb4 vfat,ext3,ext2,reiserfs noauto,users,exec 0 0
/dev/cdrom /media/cdrom udf,iso9660 noauto,users,exec,ro 0 0
/dev/ /media/cdrom udf,iso9660 noauto,users,exec,ro 0 0

I thought maybe I had made a rookie mistake since I swapped the drives after I had installed antiX, so I checked the jumpers and the cable- the jumpers on both drives are set to cable select.

This morning while starting to research the problem a bit more, I actually watched the boot process and something caught my eye. Here is a snippet from dmesg (Anyone who is interested open a console, type 'dmesg > test.txt' and then open the text file to browse at leisure)

scsi0 : pata_via
scsi1 : pata_via
ata1: PATA max UDMA/66 cmd 0x000101f0 ctl 0x000103f6 bmdma 0x0001d000 irq 14
ata2: PATA max UDMA/66 cmd 0x00010170 ctl 0x00010376 bmdma 0x0001d008 irq 15
ata1.00: ATA-6: WDC WD400BB-22HEA1, 14.03G14, max UDMA/100
ata1.00: 78165360 sectors, multi 16: LBA
ata1.01: ATA-6: WDC WD1200JB-00GVC0, 08.02D08, max UDMA/100
ata1.01: 234441648 sectors, multi 16: LBA48
ata1.00: configured for UDMA/66
ata1.01: configured for UDMA/66
ata2.00: ATAPI: HL-DT-STDVD-BOM GDR8163B, 023, max UDMA/33
ata2.00: revalidation failed (errno=-2)
ata2: failed to recover some devices, retrying in 5 secs
ata2.00: revalidation failed (errno=-2)
ata2: failed to recover some devices, retrying in 5 secs
ata2.00: revalidation failed (errno=-2)
ata2.00: disabled


It seems that ata2.00 was not happy for whatever reason. I don't have the slightest idea what ata2.00 is but since it has something to do with the dvd drive, I was suspicious.

The boot didn't seem to recognize my cd writer so I unplugged it and when I booted there were no error messages and I could mount my dvd drive (can't play music, but that doesn't bother me yet). I shutdown, unplugged the dvd, plugged in the cd writer, and rebooted. No error messages and I could mount cds. HMMMMMM!

I tried the above on Ubuntu (same computer, different partion) and found that I could not have both the dvd and the cd connected at the same time. So this is obviously a hardware problem and a relatively new one that

HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH antiX

Finally notes!!!

When I set the jumpers on master one optical drive and slave on the other then connected them to the appropriate cable connectors, the ata2.00 messages went away and everything works great now.

Katawin