28 December 2007

cd/dvd drives not working under linux (2.6.18)

At some point over the last few months my dvd drives stopped working on Linux Centos 5.0 (kernel 2.6.18). Having spent half the day googling to find a fix, looking at udev, hal, fstab, bios settings, ata/piix/ide modules, jumper settings on the drive... I found a fix to the problem. Having tried to execute

modprobe ide-cd

I got an error message about not understanding what the dma option is. Which led me onto editing /etc/modprobe.conf and commenting out the the line:

options ide-cd dma=1

This fixed the problem.