[Lula] Resurrecting old systems... cd-rom drive lifetimes

[Dan Kegel]

OK, so I chickened out on buying a new motherboard
for now.  To punish me, my old system's hard drive started
dying, so I swapped hard drives and tried installing
Ubuntu (Edgy Eft)... but the cd-rom drive had read errors
halfway through installation.  I disassembled it to
see if it was dust, but the lens looked clean.
I tried blowing it off anyway with canned air,
but that didn't change much.

"No prob", I thought, "I've got lots of spares."
I went through three spare cd-rom drives before I found one that worked!

Two of the bad drives were Sony and Samsung drivers
six and seven years old.
The third bad drive was only a couple years
old; it's a "50x" drive, brand "top-g", probably a
no-name drive I picked up at fry's.   It made some
awful funny noises before it finally went.  Maybe
the Debian alternate installer is a good stress
test...
- Dan

-- 
Wine for Windows ISVs: http://kegel.com/wine/isv