Jeffrey Alsip wrote:


Oh, wait. Here's something I should have remembered before, but didn't.
Remember that "craziest thing I ever heard" thing from the last thread?
I (again for some STRANGE reason) have better luck when I burn the FC5
boot disk at the slowest possible speed. Don't ask me why, it just
works better.

I think we should all conclude that the ProLiants have a congenital
shortcoming in the "IDE Bus" area. They, possibly, just didn't care
that much about it, since they are designed for SCSI drives. Even when
I replace the stock CD Drive with a newer, faster one, it still only
reads a BOOTABLE disk that has been burned at a slow speed. It has to
be the IDE bus that is brain damaged. It's almost as if the designers
(at the time these machines were made) had 1X, 2X, or maybe 4X CD
Drives available...and it never occurred to them that the world may
someday develop faster drives (and disks burned at faster speeds).

What I should do is put a 1600 up on the bench and runs some
benchmarks...first with the original 4X drive and then with a new 52X.
If the results show read/seek times to be close to the same, we are on
to something.

Jeff