μHOWTO: Enable the SATA CD-ROM Drive in the Dell Latitude D620

20060921 22:08 by javier

After a few weeks using the auxiliary battery instead of the CD-ROM drive, I needed to read a DVD. Surprise! It didn’t work. Reboot. Still no luck.
dmesg didn’t show anything about IDE, and /proc/ide was empty. It was like the CD-ROM didn’t exists at all.
The explanation might be that the CD-ROM is a SATA drive, not PATA. Graham William’s GNU/Linux Desktop Survival Guide holds the key to enable the drive. In short:

# echo “libata atapi_enabled=1″ >> /etc/mkinitrd/modules
# cp /boot/initrd.img-`uname -r` /boot/initrd.img-`uname -r`.bak
# mkinitrd -o /boot/initrd.img-`uname -r`
# reboot

Voilá.
(Part of the ongoing Debian GNU/Linux on Dell D620 saga.

Tags: Dell, D620, SATA, cdrom

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 21st, 2006 at 22:08 and is filed under Dell D620, General, Linux, SysAdmin. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.