by Xenos Katawin on Thu Jun 19, 2008 11:59 am
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
Reg. Linux User #249090