I have a tried and true Lite-On LTD163D reader, bolted to a SuSe Linux 9.1 Pro installation. The reader is slave to a Lite-On 52x burner, both on the secondary IDE bus.

During installation of SuSe 9.1 from a Novell DVD of SuSe 9.1 Pro, beong installed from that DVD drive, I had many 'drive ready - seek complete' errors - that drive was reading from a BRAND NEW DVD. I figured the drive might be dusty, but really that is probably not the cause - I've cleaned the lens with a CD cleaner and no change, and the inside of the PC is rather clean (all built within the same month).

I did notice that the drive was spinning screaming fast when the errors took place, and when there were no errors, the drive was not running very fast.

Is there a Linux guru here that might tell me if the default IDE drivers in Linux would throttle back the rotation speed so as to reduce read errors??? Would seem that slowing the drive should be a more immediate response than waiting for over 20 errors to decide that the speed needed reducing.... each error requires many spin ups then spin downs before the 'drive ready - seek complete' error arises.

Before you answer.... the problem did not occur when I used CDRs to install the same release of SuSe 9.1 Pro.

I've never heard that drive spin so fast.....

ive good experiences with debian linux and too years of very bad experience with a liteon oem-ltd1x dvd-reader.

that drive was the worst crap i ever bought.

I'm no Linux guru, started just two weeks ago. But I tried installing SuSE from cd (downloaded image). It didn't install correctly. Maybe a bad burn, don't know, but it was weird. Downloaded Mandrake and that worked. I guess someone like Dee-ehn could help you better, being an expert on Linux

Btw, got no problem what so ever with my dvd-drive

Ok, no help so far....
I post because the same drive reads CDs, and CDRs at the same high rotational speed, and has no errors, but when it spins the DVD disc at that speed, that is, IMO, too fast for the more highly compacted data in the DVD disc to be read reliably. Further, the way the drive acts it tells me that A] a slower rotational speed works better than faster, B] the Linux control mechanism needs to be refined since it started out at an error free rotational speed, then that control mechanism started allowing the DVD drive to spin so fast as to create errors - that means the Linux control mechanism (err, DVDROM hardware being controlled by device control software is what I actually mean) lost track of the quality of the data stream, which was acceptable at the slower rotational speed. During one installation attempt, the drive ran too fast several times, finally deciding on an ATAPI reset and then resumed slower rotation, then began running too fast all over again.

I've seen this 'spin too fast, get ATAPI reset, return to normal for a while' sequence on several different Linux systems (VIA chipsets, but different chipsets), on different drive types (this DVD-ROM, a CDRW, even on a CDROM reader) and IIRC, always on /dev/hdd (2nd IDE, Slave, on furthest cable connection from mobo), using vastly different releases of differet distros (Mandrake 8.0 - 8.2, ArchLinux 0.4, now SuSe 9.1 Pro running Kernel 2.6).

If there are no Linux ATAPI gurus here, please point me to the proper authorities....