Re: cd burning with plextor drives.

[Matthew Wilcox <matthew@wil.cx>]

On Sun, Jul 30, 2006 at 12:13:06AM +0200, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> 
> > (As a historical oddity - there _was_ this bug in some drive that would 
> > corrupt the firmware by mistake, though - I think we _did_ actually fry 
> > some drives by sending it a "cache flush" command that it wasn't 
> > expecting, and that it turned into firmware reload thing or something. I 
> > think Alan Cox knows all the gruesome details, but that we could 
> > definitely blame on bad hardware..
> 
> since you asked for it...
> 
> a certain distribution shipped a preproduction version of a packet
> writing patch or it was some barrier thing, I forgot, which would end up
> sending an *ATA* "cache flush" command to ATAPI drives that didn't claim
> to understand that command range. A certain model of cdrom drive (LG?)
> actually had that same command byte code as "flash firmware". 
> 
> Arguably it's a very stupid value to pick, but it's also not technically
> a drive bug; the drive explicitly claimed to not understand the command
> set in question, and that distro kernel sent it anyway. 

Actually, the standard does prohibit these command values from being
reused for different purposes.  http://lwn.net/Articles/55815/