8 Jul 2002 MikeCamel   » (Journeyer)

marriage
It's our seven year wedding anniversary today! Not an itch in sight, and we're both very happy (well, I am, and she says she is!). We had to be up at 6:15am this morning so that Catherine could get to London in time, and as a result, it was only when she texted me on the way to work that I realised that we'd both forgotten! Presents later.

cdrecord
As I finally moved our CDRW from Catherine's machine to mine (hers runs WinXP, which doesn't seem to want to burn any CDs at all), and I've been reading lots of security books recently, I thought it was high time I did some backing up of data. So I made an image (mkisofs), and then tried to burn it to a clean CD (cdrecord). Hang, big time. Button at the front of the box big time.

So, next time, try it as root. No obvious reason - just thought I would. Same problem. Reboot, try it from the command line, without going into X (sometimes X gets upset, in my experience, and won't respond to the appropriate 3-finger salute). Hang. Same, as root. Hang. Time to do some searching on the 'Net.

And it turns out that if you've got your CDRW hooked up to an off-board IDE card (mine's a Promise one), some people have big problems. So, I think, let's try moving my HDDs to the IDE card, and my CDRW to the onboard. Much swearing and pulling and pushing of connectors, then power and reboot. Machine doesn't immediately find boot partition (which is fair), and tries to use BOOTP. Interesting - I escape it. It finds LILO (which surprises me), and the boot partition. However, it panics on not being able to find the root partition, which is also fair. I'd wondered whether the ide bus had a direct mapping to hd* devices, and now I know.

Pull machine apart again, reattach HDDs to old IDE interface, move other drives around. Reboot - machine comes up. Spend some time changing soft links in /dev, checking /etc/fstab, and then try cdrecord. Joy. So, in the hopes that others will find this account useful, here's something for the search engines to fix on:
"cdrecord CDRW IDE card Promise hang".

health
Remember I said that I'd gone to see Catherine down in Sussex, because she was unwell? Well, I picked it up, and was up at 4am on Saturday morning throwing up and the rest. Not the nicest weekend, and I must have been mad to agree to see the parents-in-law on Saturday. Oh well, I did spend most of the day asleep in the car while they walked around Stamford, and they did give me a well-done present for passing the MBA, so it wasn't all bad.

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