Sun CD-ROM drive won't mount after 2-3 ejects

[Ruth Milner]

In article <2941 at brchh104.bnr.ca> unr!malc at uunet.uu.net (Malcolm Carlock) writes:
>We have a Sun IPC with attached CDROM drive which works up until after
>the second or third eject operation, after which time attempts to mount
>the CDROM filesystem (even from disks that had been successfully mounted
>a few minutes before) fail with "I/O error".  The following methods
>consistently work/don't work in clearing up the problem, which has been
>present since the drive came out of the box:

We have been having a very similar problem with a CD-ROM attached to a
SPARC2 (but we moved it to a SPARC1 and it failed there too). It will
mount a couple of times and then start failing. The error we get from the
mount is "no such device or address", and when you look at
/usr/adm/messages it says 

   sr0: disk not responding to selection
   sr0: Unit not Ready. Additional sense code 0.

Please don't suggest that we are missing some kernel support; sr0 is
there, HSFS is there, the SCSI address and termination are correct, etc.
etc. It does work, just not for any length of time.

There are an internal disk, an external disk, and an Exabyte also on the
bus.

We first notified Sun of this in January. Both the drive and the SCSI
cable have been replaced to no avail. As noted above, the problem happened
on two CPUs, so it seems unlikely to be a CPU problem. It was also tried
while the SPARC1 was at 4.1 (the SS2 has of course always been at 4.1.1).

Our local Sun service rep. has been able to produce a problem, though not
the same one, by mounting and unmounting a non-HSFS CD without the -r
option (HSFS won't let you do this). On the umount, the system attempts to
write to the disk and generates several SCSI errors. On about the third
time, the umount hangs the system. 

It looks as though there are indeed some peculiar problems with the Sun
CD-ROM.

Ruth Milner
Systems Manager                     NRAO/VLA                  Socorro NM
Computing Division Head      rmilner at zia.aoc.nrao.edu