Poofy Goof Rant-O-Matic

I've had a plextor PX-740A in my home desktop machine now for over a year, and it's never worked correctly. it was a special at Fry's, but it had been unopened, and the last plextor I bought there (a SCSI plexwriter 8/2/20) is still working fine, so I figured the non-working bit had to be something I was doing.

I originally suspected the silicon labs SATA-cum-PATA controller, but was too lazy to find a replacement. besides, when you've got access to other machines with CD drives within an arm's reach, it's not much of a big deal to just load things from another machine. (ahh, the joys of a network filesystems.)

today I decided to pull my machine apart and replace the controller with a promise ultra100 and get things going. it'd be nice to burn DVDs. no joy. I took a closer look at things, and even found that the cable may have been damaged, tossed it, replaced it, and still no go. I can dd from the device all day long, but nothing will mount. this is still a slight improvement over the silicon labs controller, which locked up the machine tight.

stupid hardware. why can't you just work? looks like I'll be taking this to work sometime in the future and swap it out with a DVD burner there.

here's the dmesg:

pdcide0 at pci0 dev 11 function 0
pdcide0: Promise Ultra100/ATA Bus Master IDE Accelerator (rev. 0x02)
pdcide0: bus-master DMA support present
pdcide0: primary channel configured to native-PCI mode
pdcide0: using irq 5 for native-PCI interrupt
pdcide0: secondary channel configured to native-PCI mode
atabus0 at pdcide0 channel 0
atapibus0 at atabus0: 2 targets
cd0 at atapibus0 drive 0: cdrom removable
cd0: 32-bit data port
cd0: drive supports PIO mode 4, DMA mode 2, Ultra-DMA mode 2 (Ultra/33)
cd0(pdcide0:0:0): using PIO mode 4, Ultra-DMA mode 2 (Ultra/33) (using DMA)